


Sign and Semblance

by kerlin



Category: CSI
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-30
Updated: 2010-08-30
Packaged: 2017-10-11 08:51:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 57,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A night of culture gone awry proves that the CSIs never really have time off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"Wake up, sunshine."

Sara cracked an eye open and then immediately scrunched it shut again. "Who are you and what have you done with Gil Grissom?"

Grissom's only response to that was to yank the covers off of the bed, exposing her skin to the icy air conditioning of the townhouse. She yelped and curled into a tight ball, dragging the other pillow up and over her head.

"I could ask you the same thing," he responded. "Sleeping in?"

Sara considered reminding him that she hadn't finished the chem analysis on the Marshall case until noon, but decided flattery would be the better route. "You wore me out?"

"Sara..."

She loved that tone - slightly reproachful, bashful, tinged with just a hint of pride. It was paradoxically exciting to know that she brought out the prude in Grissom. "Right, I know, the play." She inched the pillow down and looked up at him. "Do I smell coffee?"

"You do," he confirmed.

In one smooth motion, she was on her knees on the bed, facing Grissom and hooking her arms around his neck. "Remind me again why we can't just...stay in and watch the movie? I could make it worth your while," she suggested with a wink.

He responded by reaching up behind his neck to cover her hands with his own, and she frowned slightly, thinking he was going to loosen her grip. Instead, he ran his hands up her bare arms, skimming across the straps from her tank top and cupping her cheeks. For a few heartbeats, he just looked down at her, studying her with the same intensity she'd seen him use in examining a particularly perplexing piece of evidence.

Some people might have said it was demeaning, to be examined like an object. Sara had never minded. Having Grissom's full attention focused on her was far too intoxicating an experience.

He broke the silence first, speaking softly, as if he too were afraid to make the moment flee. "Shakespeare needs to be experienced live. Film is a poor substitute for the energy, the passion of the stage."

Sara tipped her head to the side, leaning further into his hand, and smiled at him slightly. "All right. I'll be out of the shower in ten." She turned her head to drop a kiss onto his palm and bounced off the bed to head for the bathroom.

Seven minutes later she emerged from the bathroom feeling much more refreshed and enjoying the guilty pleasure of one of Grissom's oversized bathrobes - even though she knew she would get a scowl when she entered the kitchen. Sure enough, a slight frown touched his lips when he recognized the bathrobe.

"You're very predictable sometimes," she informed him, accepting the cup of coffee gratefully.

"What?"

"Never mind," Sara answered with a smile. "What time is the play again? You look nice, by the way."

Grissom blinked and looked down at his shirt and pants before looking back up to answer her question. "Seven o'clock."

She sighed with happiness at the first taste of the coffee, and then leaned over to look at the time displayed on the microwave. "I should get dressed then, huh."

He just quirked an eyebrow at her. Apparently, he wasn't in a very communicative mood today. She could handle that. Singing under her breath, she returned to the bedroom to get changed.

Grissom was sitting on the couch, nose in a collection of Keats, when Sara emerged again from the bedroom. He caught sight of her around the edge of the book - she was wearing something red. His pulse sped up accordingly, and he spent a moment in pondering just what physiological quirk of the male body meant that after several thousand years of evolution, red had become such an erotic color.

His very scholarly, very logical train of thought sailed over a cliff when Sara tipped the book down and smiled at him.

"Hey," she said softly, and backed up so he could see the entire dress. "Well?"

Grissom was well aware of exactly how long Sara's legs were - he had measured them with fingers and tongue enough times - but he couldn't quite escape the thought that they got longer every time he looked. Impossibly long, slim legs that disappeared into a gauzy skirt, a material of a color he'd once heard Catherine call fire-engine red, clinging to her curves. Spaghetti straps and a swan's neck, hair pinned up behind her head with just a few curls escaping.

He set the book aside and swallowed hard. "You look stunning."

He loved making Sara blush.

"So, do you come here often?" Sara asked, craning her neck to take in the very impressive chandelier in the theater lobby.

"I have season tickets," Grissom replied easily, his fingers tickling the inside of her forearm as he guided her gently.

"Huh," was the only response she could make as she concentrated on not killing herself while climbing the carpeted stairs in heels. Their relationship, however natural and easy, was still new, and it seemed that every day she learned something new about Grissom.

The usher, whose nametag identified him as Cameron, seemed to recognize Grissom, and smiled widely, not even bothering to check their tickets. He showed them to their seats, and while Grissom was still sitting down, Sara couldn't resist the temptation and checked her ticket. 22A - exactly where she was sitting now. She wondered briefly if he often came here with a guest, and then very firmly told herself not to go there.

There were still ten minutes before curtain, and Sara staved off her need to fidget by reading the program Cameron had given her right before she'd sat down.

"The part of Senor Leonato will be played by Colin Amberly tonight," she read from an inset page. Flipping to the cast page, she found Colin Amberly's picture listed under understudy for both Senor Leonato and Antonio.

Grissom was being suspiciously quiet, and she snuck a glance at him to see that he was reading his program intently.

Sara had never been the play-going type. The last time she'd taken literature had been senior year in high school, and she'd been incredibly glad to go straight into physics at Harvard. Literature offered too many gray areas, too much touchy-feely interpretation. There had been times when she'd wondered if she were missing something, but she'd always shaken herself out of it and delved back into science.

Falling in love with Grissom had spun that worldview the full hundred and eighty degrees. There was nothing that didn't fascinate him, and his love of learning was ingrained even more deply than his love of science. So slowly, she'd been opening herself to his teachings, quizzing him on the books she found in the townhouse, drawing him into a debate over a book she'd picked up at the library because it had been highly ranked by the New York Times.

His response had been gratifyingly overwhelming, and as he opened up to her, she'd only fallen more deeply in love with the complex, incredible man.

"She missed a line," Grissom murmured, and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The woman in front of him glanced over her shoulder in an annoyed gesture, but he ignored her.

"Maybe - " Sara hesitated, and then continued her whisper. "Maybe she just decided not to say it," she suggested.

He knew she had almost said "Maybe you didn't hear it," and he was grateful that she hadn't continued in that vein.

"Possible," he whispered back, but inwardly he doubted it. There was something off about this entire scene. Hero had fainted dead away when first accused by Claudio, and she had yet to even twitch. Certainly, the scene was open to interpretation, but he doubted the Las Vegas Repertory Company would have interpreted so far as to cut Hero's responses to the scene.

Her second line passed, and she was still wan and pale, head lolling where it rested on Beatrice's shoulder, and Grissom frowned. Something was very, very off about this scene. She didn't exit so much as she was dragged, slumped between Leonato and the friar's shoulders.

Sara's soft sigh distracted him completely, and he took his eyes from the stage to be completely enchanted by the sight of a smile that could only be described as goofy. Beatrice and Benedick were proclaiming their love for each other on stage, and for a brief moment Sara turned her head to look at him, and then that same smile was directed entirely at him. His heart turned in his chest, and he squeezed her fingers gently before turning his attention back to Beatrice's tirade on stage.

The scene ended, and the house lights went up, signifying intermission.

"Well?" he asked her, intensely curious as to her interpretation of the play thus far.

He was met with the full Sidle smile. "It's good. It's really good. I mean, it stretches the bounds of logic a little far. I don't really get how Claudio is going to completely forget how angry he is with her just because he thinks she's dead."

"Death is final," Grissom suggested. "Claudio loves Hero, no matter what he accused her of, and to have his last words to her be so cruel that they killed her..."

Sara seemed to consider that for a few moments. "And I'm not really going to get into the stupidity of the whole virginity question, because I know that was typical of the time period. But he seemed a little too ready to believe something like that even on so little evidence."

They debated like that, easily, and Grissom was fascinated by the workings of her mind. He could very nearly see the wheels turning as she stretched to apply herself to this new discipline, much as he had observed her from the podium at the seminar so many years ago. There was nothing quite like it in the world.

The lights flickered to signify the end to intermission, and they both settled back into their seats, Grissom once again capturing her fingers with his.

But instead of the house lights going down, a spotlight was trained on the stage, and a man in a tuxedo appeared.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that due to uncontrollable circumstances, tonight's performance of Much Ado About Nothing will not be continued. If you wish to exchange your tickets or receive a reimbursement, please address yourselves to the box office in the lobby at this time, or at a later date. Please accept our utmost apologies."

Hero. The young woman playing Hero - what was her name? Grissom flipped through his program. Bianca Tolmen.

"That's weird," Sara commented. "Does this happen often?"

He shook his head as he stood up to let people by. "Almost never."  



	2. Sign and Semblance Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Grissom's index finger skimming the exposed skin at the small of her back made her jump and hit the knob, sending it careening out of focus and the stool she had been sitting on crashing to the floor.

Sara refocused the microscope, fiddling with the knob to get the highest detail possible.

Grissom's index finger skimming the exposed skin at the small of her back made her jump and hit the knob, sending it careening out of focus and the stool she had been sitting on crashing to the floor.

"Dammit, Grissom, you scared me half to death!" she accused him, but at his half-smile and shrug, she couldn't keep the glare going for long. The thought that Grissom couldn't stand not to touch made her giddy.

"I can make up for it," he said, holding up a folder.

Sara narrowed her eyes at him and pursed her lips. "What've you got?"

"Grab Warrick on your way and I'll let you know," he promised, and breezed back out of the lab. She was left staring at his retreating back with frustration.

Warrick was in the drying room right next to the lab she'd been working in, and for a moment she wondered by Grissom hadn't just sought out the other CSI himself. In the end she shrugged, righted the stool, and put the fiber evidence she'd been working with back in the collection envelope, planning on dropping it off after she alerted Warrick to the meeting.

He was examining a bloody towel under an ALS when she entered, and motioned her over, handing her a pair of red goggles. "What do you think that is?"

"Um." She leaned over the towel to get a closer look at the stain. "Not blood. It almost looks like...wine?"

"Yeah, that's what I thought, too," Warrick said, nodding and flicking the ALS off. "Missed it on the first pass-through. To the naked eye it's mixed in with the blood." He sampled the section of towel and tucked the swab back into a box. "Suspect says he came home and found his wife in the bathtub, slit wrists. He grabbed the towel and tried to stop the blood flow."

"Then how did the wine get there," Sara finished his thought for him, nodding. "Not something you usually find in a bathroom."

"It's not much, but Robbins already reported that the cuts on the wrists were not consistent with suicide." Warrick shrugged. "It's a new direction."

"Speaking of new," Sara said as he folded up the towel and replaced it on the hangar, "Grissom wants us down in the break room. I'm thinking hot case."

"Cool. Be there in five."

"You'll be there before me," Sara said, holding up the collection envelope. "I've got to go drop this off. Don't start without me, okay?"

"Sure."

Catherine popped open the can of Diet Coke and swirled it around in her mouth for a moment before swallowing. It was her first caffeine of the night, and an incredibly welcome jolt of energy. Lindsey had been home sick from school with a stomach bug, and Catherine had barely slept in between shepherding her daughter back and forth to the bathroom and refilling the juice in her "sick cup," a baby's tippy cup that Lindsey insisted on using whenever she felt even slightly ill.

"Oh, come on," Nick howled in disgust, and reached across to hit the power button on the television in disgust. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he crossed his arms petulantly. "Third error of the game," he explained, shaking his head in frustration.

"O-kay," Catherine said, shrugging.

"So, hot case?" Warrick asked, entering the room and flipping a chair around to straddle.

Catherine raised her eyebrow. "Not that I know of...Nick?"

"Nah, I haven't heard anything either," Nick said, tossing and catching an apple.

"Sara told me Grissom wanted us in the break room," Warrick clarified, arcing an eyebrow.

"You think she..." Nick began, but cut his sentence in the middle when Sara entered the room.

"Do we have a new case?" she asked eagerly, immediately nixing the tentative theory, as she took a seat next to Warrick.

"We were hoping you could tell us," Catherine put forward, and watched with keen interest as Sara's eyes narrowed and immediately went into suspicion overdrive.

"I don't know anything more than you do," the other CSI answered, and leaned forward to snatch Nick's apple from mid-air.

"Hey!" he protested, mock-glaring at her. She just shrugged impishly and bit in.

They were all a bit on edge, Catherine reflected. There hadn't been anything more complicated than a breaking and entering for the past two weeks, and while the last thing any of them would wish for was murder, the monotony was beginning to wear on a group of high-functioning individuals like the night shift CSIs.

"Grissom, please tell us you have something," Nick begged the instant their supervisor set foot in the room, and the entomologist looked up from his open binder to see a room full of anxious forensic scientists.

"I do," he said non-comitally, and seated himself at the table.

Catherine had always known that Grissom had a streak of perversity, but this was really pushing it. "And?"

"Suspicious circs, Las Vegas Reperetory Theater," he said, sliding the assignment sheet out to the center of the table, and across from Catherine, Sara started and stared at Grissom. Catherine catalogued the rather uncharacteristic reaction to keep in mind for later.

None of them were quite so far gone as to stand up and cheer, but there was a definite lightening in mood.

"All hands on deck?" Warrick asked, passing the slip to Sara to read.

"Until something else comes up," Grissom clarified. "Bianca Tolmen, twenty-seven years old. Fainted onstage and later went into convulsions backstage. She was taken to Desert Palms and is now listed as death imminent. No pre-existing medical condition, so doctors put her through a battery of blood tests."

"Poison," Sara said, straightening in her chair and completing Grissom's thought.

"Strychnine," Grissom supplied, favoring Sara with a slight smile.

"We have a case," Warrick said with satisfaction.

"I'll drive," Sara volunteered, jumping out of her chair and heading to the door.  



	3. Sign and Semblance Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Ms. Keller," he replied with a smile. "This is my job."

"Mr. Grissom." A tall, statuesque woman rushed forward and clasped his hands warmly, her air one of acute distress. "So good of you to come yourself."

"Ms. Keller," he replied with a smile. "This is my job."

"Of course," she acknowledged with a hand wave, pulling her hands away from Grissom's. It was obvious she had settled on the idea that Grissom had personally decided to respond to her distress. "Such a terrible thing, such a dear girl, such a logistical nightmare. Have you applied for your refund yet?"

Warrick shifted on his feet, and decided on suspect number one. Theater was a financial nightmare, he knew, especially in a city where culture took a second place to spinning roulette wheels. But to have the company director more concerned about the logistics of refunds than about the imminent death of one of her actors?

"We went directly home," Grissom was telling Ms. Keller. "May we see the backstage area, please?"

We. Warrick swiveled on his heel to look at Sara where she was standing very close to Grissom. She caught his eyes and nodded slightly, confirming his unasked question. Huh.

"Of course," Ms. Keller said, waving her hands again, and Warrick began to wonder if it was a nervous habit or a learned affectation to make her look more theatrical. Either way, it was incredibly annoying. "But I'm sorry, where are my manners? I'm Jessica Keller, the theater director."

Each CSI nodded in turn, and then Jessica turned with another flourish of her hands and led them through the lobby and down the loges, then through a set of swinging double doors. The decor instantly became more austere, concrete floor and eggshell white walls, with spare track lighting.

Sara hung back and Warrick adjusted his stride to come up next to her, nudging her shoulder to jar her from her thoughts. "Even on a date, huh?"

She furrowed her brow as if she didn't quite follow him, or could follow him and didn't like where he was going, but finally shrugged and grinned wryly. "Apparently."

He chuckled in return, and the mood was lightened considerably. He hadn't expected her to offer up more than that; while the entire team knew about Grissom and Sara's relationship in theory, in practice none of them except perhaps Catherine had ever been able to glean a single detail, and she was guarding those details ferociously.

"Her dressing room," Jessica gestured.

Brass was already standing by the open door, and jerked his chin to acknowledge them when they arrived. "I've got all the remaining actors and other personnel in the auditorium. Dressing room is all yours."

"Remaining?" Grissom queried, sounding distinctly displeased.

"We didn't know Bianca had been...poisoned...for some time," Jessica explained as she waved her arms around, and Warrick had a completely irrational desire to grab her hands and hold them still. "Several company members asked to leave, and I saw no reason not to grant their request."

Grissom grunted in response, and leaned to poke his head in the dressing room door over the crime scene tape. "Divide and conquer. Catherine, you go with Brass. Treat the stage as a crime scene and interview anyone who was in the scene the victim fainted in." Catherine nodded and Brass held out his arm for her to precede him down the hall. "Nick, Warrick, the green room."

"Green room?" Nick asked.

"Why would you need to see the green room?" Jessica asked, a hint of irritation showing through.

"Bianca Tolmen was poisoned. We'll need to collect any food she may have had contact with and bring it back to the lab for testing." Turning to Nick, Grissom added "The green room is the place where actors rest in between scenes."

"Got it," Nick replied.

"Where is it?" Warrick asked, turning to address himself to Jessica. She fluttered her hands again and he repressed a sigh.

"This way. I'll take you."

"Here we go," Sara murmured, slipping on her latex gloves with a satisfying snap.

Grissom leaned forward to push the door fully open, revealing a small easy chair that had been hidden. Other than that, the room was tiny enough for them to see all of it from the door way.

Sara picked up the heavy camera and snapped a few locator shots. Besides the easy chair on the right wall, there was a battered dressing table with a mirror against the back wall, a wooden chair pulled up in front of that, and what looked like a small trash can in the right hand corner. She stood up on her toes and confirmed that - a small wire mesh trash can, of which she could just barely see the edge.

To the left were two pegs on the wall, a pantsuit and two costume dresses hanging from them, and left of the pegs was a coat stand with a long sweater jacket and beret hanging off the pegs.

"I have a closet bigger than this room," Sara observed, tracking her flashlight across the dressing table. "There's some kind of liquid on the surface of the dressing table."

Grissom pulled his gloves on in turn. "Shoe prints," he instructed her, and Sara nodded. The carpet was thick and low, and she flipped open the translucent aqua top of her kit with a practiced gesture, sliding out the necessary equipment. Lifting prints electrostatically was mindless, simple work, and Grissom stayed silent at the door while she proceeded square by square. Within twenty minutes she had finished the first half of the room and lifted five separate useable prints.

"Some kind of residue powder over here," she called out from where she was on her hands and knees by the coat stand. Grissom ducked under the crime scene tape and handed her down some tape. Sara pressed down firmly on the carpet, picking up the light beige powder, and closed the tape up again, passing it up to Grissom.

Fifteen more minutes and Sara had two more prints and an aching back. She straightened slowly. "Done," she informed him, even though she was well aware that he had been watching her the entire time.

Grissom was swabbing the spilled liquid on the table. "Water," he said, sounding slightly disappointed. He capped the swab and slid it back into the box anyway.

"It's been what, five, six hours since she fainted?" Sara theorized aloud. "There must have been a lot of it to evaporate and still leave some."

His only response was a low "hmmm."

She continued to think aloud. "Did the hospital say how she was poisoned?"

He shook his head. "All they knew is that it was strychnine."

"Could've been oral," she offered, leaving his side to snap a picture of the trashcan and then to lean over and pick it up. "Grissom, take a look at this."

Within seconds he was looking over her shoulder, as close as physically possible without actually touching, and Sara hid her small smile. "Roses?"

"Looks like a dozen," Sara said, tilting the trash can so she could count. "No, two dozen. Wow, some guys really know how to make an impression."

He turned his head toward her, and looked so adorably confused that Sara had to resist the urge to kiss him. Instead she settled for smiling broadly at him and then turning back to the trash can. "Of course, if that's your thing. I've always been more of a plant girl, myself. Cut flowers die quickly."

His warm breath pushed aside the hair at her neck, and she nearly jumped, finally deciding that this innocent flirtation had gone far enough. Setting the trash can down, she knelt beside it on the carpet, beginning to photograph and catalogue each item, still speaking aloud out of habit.

"Makes you wonder why a girl would throw away two dozen roses, though. And the vase. Oh, that's going to be a pain to fingerprint." She turned the heavy, faceted crystal vase around in her gloved hand, admiring its craftsmanship and the way the drops of water still clinging to the inside refracted the light.

"Fiber on the chair," Grissom announced from a few feet away where he was tape lifting the surface of the easy chair. "Black and white strands, and it's not the same material."

Sara pulled the roses out of the trash, careful not to catch her gloves on the thorns, and tipped them up so she could take a closer look. "These are definitely fresh, probably got them tonight. I wonder who sent them, that she didn't want them?"

Grissom didn't answer, and Sara slid the roses into an evidence bag and moved on to the next level of trash. Below the vase of roses was a crumpled piece of cardboard. Unfolding it carefully, Sara read the inscription aloud. "For love is as strong as death... Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it." Still no answer, and Sara decided to prod Grissom a bit. "Now, see, there's a sentiment."

"It's plagiarized," Grissom commented from where he was examining the seams of the chair. "Song of Solomon."

"So you were paying attention." She sat back on her heels and watched him dig white powder out of a seam and into a bindle.

"I always pay attention," he chided her. "No name?"

"Nope. It's hard to read, even. The water from the flowers has blurred the words a lot. I'll get it straight to Ronnie when we get back, he should have fun with it." Continuing with the trash can, Sara bagged a tissue with lipstick and other makeup residue, a Luna bar wrapper with a little bit of peanut butter still stuck to it, and an empty mascara tube. "Nothing really out of the ordinary besides the roses and the card. You got anything?"

He didn't answer, and she shrugged and pulled the chair out from the desk to sit down and began sorting through the objects lined up on the clear plastic placed on top of the wooden top. Underneath the plastic was a charming and random collage of old photos of actresses in color-tint and black and white, copies of vintage theater posters, and dried flowers. But lined up on top of the plastic-trapped collage, Bianca Tolmen had more makeup than Sara had ever owned in her life. With a long-suffering sigh, she began to mark each tube of lipstick and each case of blush into evidence. "Greg is going to scream bloody murder."

"Let him," Grissom said easily, coming up behind her and shining his flashlight on the pictures suck into the frame of the makeup mirror. "Do you think that's our Bible-quoting rose-sender?"

The picture in question showed two people in Mickey Mouse ears in front of Cinderella's castle, arms around each other's waists, smiling for the camera. Bianca Tolmen was on the left in a white tank top and khaki shorts, dark hair loose and down to her waist, a carefree grin on her face. The man beside her could have posed for GQ in his carefully pressed gray polo shirt and pleated khaki pants. Whereas the Mickey Mouse ears looked as natural as such a hat could look atop Bianca's head, the man wore his awkwardly atop tightly curling blond hair, and his smile was one of abashed chagrin. His arm rested possessively on Bianca's waist, though, and she leaned into him.

Sara slid the picture out from the frame and read the back. "'Disneyland, '99.' No names." Next was an aged snapshot of an older man and woman who looked enough like Bianca to be family - probably parents. Bianca, it seemed, took after her father and showed evidence of a Native American heritage: striking cheekbones, dusky olive skin, and luxurious dark hair.

There were other pictures, one of an unidentifiable group of people mounted on mules at the Grand Canyon, one of a gray tortoiseshell cat craning his neck up at the camera, and one of Bianca and the same man from Disneyland in a gondola.

"That's not the Venetian," Sara said matter-of-factly.

Grissom tapped a bridge clearly visible in the background of the photo. "The Bridge of Sighs. That's really Venice."

"So our mystery man is loaded," she said wryly, putting the photo in another evidence bag. "I don't know much about theater, but I know that you don't do it for the money."

"Very true," Grissom agreed. "Especially not in Vegas. Someone with as much talent as Bianca Tolmen showed on stage could very easily make her way as a showgirl and earn a lot more money than doing Shakespeare."

Sara frowned at the picture for a moment, and then continued searching through the drawers of the desk.  



	4. Sign and Semblance Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warrick's voice called his attention to the small television in the corner of the green room immediately as they entered, and they could see Catherine pacing off a small section of the stage. "Ah." He turned to Jessica Keller, who was standing in the doorway. "Is this recorded?"

"Nick."

Warrick's voice called his attention to the small television in the corner of the green room immediately as they entered, and they could see Catherine pacing off a small section of the stage. "Ah." He turned to Jessica Keller, who was standing in the doorway. "Is this recorded?"

She shook her head. "Almost never. It's a closed-circuit television system so that the actors taking breaks between scenes can see what's going on onstage and know when to be in the wings."

"Almost never?" Nick prompted, the query in his voice obvious.

Jessica shrugged. "The system does have recording capabilities, but it's only engaged during rehearsals, as a learning tool, and during special performances so that we can then sell the tapes."

"Was it engaged last night?" Warrick asked, watching Catherine kneel down and photograph the floor of a constructed wedding altar onstage.

"I doubt it."

"But you're not sure."

Jessica narrowed her eyes, and any semblance of the ditzy woman who had greeted them disappeared behind the flint of her eyes. "I may be the director, but I don't know every single thing that goes on in this theater. No, I'm not sure."

"Where would the tape be, if it existed?" Warrick pressed.

"In the lighting box. The television system is controlled by the same system that regulates the sound for the pickup mikes." She frowned, and twitched her shoulders. "Yes, I'll bring you there."

"You all right here, man?" Warrick asked Nick, who nodded in answer.

"It's just bagging and tagging the food, nothing too complicated. See ya."

When Warrick and Jessica left, Nick turned his focus to the fridge, and slipped on gloves to begin the task of sorting through. Conceivably, Bianca could have come into contact with anything inside, so he began to enter food items into evidence.

Lean Cuisine dinners were side by side with cartons of leftover takeout, a few two liter bottles of store brand cola and cans of specific brands. Some of the tupperwares in the back smelled bad enough to kill by food poisoning, let alone any other chemical aid, and Nick left those where they were. No sense in bagging something Bianca would never have touched. Similarly, he left any unopened frozen - or semi-frozen, after a day in the fridge - meals. The rest, even if it was marked with someone else's name, went in bags specially insulated to transfer perishable frozen items.

Though, Nick reflected, if the poison turned out to be in someone else's dinner, then their case had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

When he had finished with the fridge, he began going through the cupboards and bagged salt and pepper shakers. Not much else of interest in the shelves; the assorted mismatched dishes that collected in any community area, a few boxes of plastic silverware, heavy on the spoons.

His heart skipped a few beats when he pulled a bloodstained knife out from behind an old Looney Tunes jelly jar, but a closer examination showed that it was a stage knife, blood painted on the blade. When he pushed the plastic tip against the counter, it retracted into the handle easily, and he chuckled. Apparently he'd been the target of someone else's practical joke. With a grin, he replaced the knife where he'd found it in the cupboard.

Turning, he noticed for the first time that there were points of disturbance in the corner of the room - several chairs had been knocked over, and there was a blanket spread on the floor. Jessica hadn't said anything, but that had to be where they'd brought Bianca once she began to convulse. Retrieving his camera from its case, Nick began to take locator shots, sliding behind a table to get another angle on the scene.

"Hey."

Nick jumped, nearly overturning the table he was behind. "Dammit, Warrick, don't sneak up on me like that."

"Sorry," Warrick said, but his smirk indicated he wasn't sorry at all. "Look what I found." Between his index finger and thumb, he held up a VHS tape. "She swears she has no idea why the performance tonight was taped."

"Now that's convenient," Nick mused aloud. "Insists there's no tape, and then when one turns up, has no idea why it exists. I smell a rat."

"I don't really see what the point is, though," Warrick commented, pulling out an evidence bag to drop the tape into while Nick finished photographing the corner and folded up the blanket on the floor. If Bianca had indeed convulsed there, there was a good chance she had salivated and left amylase that could then be tested for strychnine, giving them an idea of dosage and manner of ingestion. "Five hundred people, including Grissom and Sara, saw her go down on stage, and didn't think anything of it. She didn't start seizing until she was backstage."

"And Sara?" Nick asked, jerking his head up to look at his friend from where he was bagging the blanket. "Whoa. That's weird." When Warrick shrugged, Nick stared at him. "You don't think that's weird?"

"Not really," Warrick said curtly, putting an end to that line of discussion. "You set in here?"

"Yeah," Nick responded, trying to push the image of his almost-sister and his boss out of his mind. He'd been able to deal with the theoretical, but the reality was...something else. "There's blood on this blanket. We'll get it tested, but it's probably hers, from biting her tongue or cheek during the seizure. We looking for anything else back here?"

"Dunno," Warrick said, spreading his hands, and leaned over to put the tape bag in the box with the other evidence Nick had collected from the green room. "I'll go check with Grissom."

"If not, I'm going to head back to the lab, give Greg a head start on all this." Nick's gesture took in the boxes of food. "Either way, I'm going to start bringing it out to the Tahoe."

"Cool. I'll give you a call if there's anything else for us to do."

Catherine followed Brass down the narrow hall and up a back stairwell. They emerged to a sight Catherine remembered from a hundred childhood dance recitals: the wings of a proscenium stage. They threaded their way through the ropes of the counterweight systems for the curtains, past sandbags and brooms and the occasional hanging clipboard to emerge onto the stage itself.

Even with the house lights on and a dozen angry theater personnel in the seats instead of a cheering public, there was something magical about being on stage. The heels of her boots clicked across the hardwood floor, sending an echo through the empty theater, and she had to repress the urge to spin around in sheer delight. It was the same ghost of a feeling she'd chased dancing around poles, only a thousand times more intense on a stage with this much grandeur.

Brass, unsurprisingly, was entirely immune, and pointed to stage right, where an impressively detailed wedding altar blended in with the background cloth, painted to resemble an Italian villa in springtime. Plastic vines trailed up columns, and a slight ramp led up to a carpeted landing. Arrayed diagonally toward the back of the stage were benches, placed so that the audience wouldn't be looking at a ninety degree angle at the wedding guests, but at more of a hundred-thirty degree angle, showing three quarters of their fronts. It was a forced optical illusion typical of theater set design that permitted actors to stay true to the rule to always keep their front to the audience, especially when working on a proscenium stage.

"She fainted there, right on schedule," Brass said, interrupting Catherine's memories of high school theater class. "Only she really fainted. She missed two lines, and they had to carry her off stage. At first, they thought she was just getting into the role, but as soon as they brought her downstairs, she went into seizures and they called the ambulance."

"I'll check it out," Catherine told him, and set her evidence kit down beside the raised platform, hooking the camera strap around her neck and snapping photographs of the wedding altar. When she'd taken shots from several angles, she set the camera down and began to examine the surface of the platform. It was short, tightly woven white carpet, designed to muffle the sound the actors made walking across it and yet still blend in with the rest of the set.

After twenty minutes of searching, Catherine had found almost no evidence at all save for some beige powder that she theorized was entirely innocuous. It was more or less as she had expected. Bianca Tolmen had been poisoned offstage; only her collapse had taken place onstage. It was still considered part of the crime scene, but it was the least likely location for anything that would help to advance the case.

Straightening, she brushed the white fiber from the carpet from her knees and made a moue of annoyance when it clung stubbornly. It wouldn't exactly be prudent to use the lint roll from her evidence kit to get rid of it, so after a few more ineffectual swipes, she resigned herself to its presence and descended the stairs in the middle of the stage to join Brass in the interviews.

Sara slid open the bottom left drawer of the dressing table and realized she was going to have to abandon the chair for the floor if she wanted to avoid getting a crick in her neck and do a proper search of its contents. Unfortunately, moving from the chair meant giving up Grissom's warm pressure against her right thigh as he sat on the floor, searching the contents of the right-hand drawers. She doubted he was conscious of the touch, but it had kept a small smile on her face through the past half-hour of quiet, monotonous searching.

Small sacrifices. She shut the drawer and dropped down to the floor where it had just been, reopening the drawer into her lap. Grissom had a theory that the lower you went in a desk, the more personal stuff got. She'd threatened to test that theory out once, applying it to his desk at work, and had relented at the horrified look on his face. In any case, she'd taken his reaction as confirmation.

So far, the theory was holding true for dressing tables, too. The first drawer had contained old theater programs, ticket stubs, pens and scrap paper, odds and ends of makeup that had all probably been there before Bianca had taken possession of this room for the duration of the show, and would more than likely have been left behind if Bianca had lived to move on - for there was no doubt that she was brain-dead, and would succumb to her coma within the next forty-eight hours at the latest.

The second drawer had been deeper, and had contained objects and supplies specific to this production; a tattered script, a worn-through garland of fake roses that Sara remembered from the wedding scene, a few cards from well-wishers congratulating her on opening night, the official playbill and a few professional photos taken for publicity purposes that showed Bianca in her white Renaissance dress, ribbons streaming through her hair, looking adoringly at the handsome young man who had played Claudio.

And finally, the third drawer, deeper still, which contained a white suede purse with four inch fringe. It wasn't something Sara would ever have picked out for herself, but she had to admit that it made a certain statement. Catherine, if she'd been so inclined, could have pulled it off. She set the purse aside for now and continued through the drawer. There was a worn and aged leather-bound copy of Shakespeare's complete comedies, and a jewelry box of the size typically used to hold necklaces. The purse had taken up the majority of the space.

She closed the drawer and opened the purse to begin to set its contents out on the floor. A pocketbook, with a driver's license, credit cards, a gym membership card, a few of the plastic gift cards - one for Border's, and one for a clothing boutique on the Strip. A frequent customer card from a coffee shop Sara recognized as being not far from the UNLV campus, a few receipts for gas, groceries, a run to CVS for toiletries. It was entirely and completely innocuous.

Bianca Tolmen apparently hadn't been the type to keep photos of friends and family in her purse, so they had no further clues as to who the mystery blond man might be. In the meantime, Sara pulled out a keychain and identified at least two apartment-type keys on it, as well as a bronzed Mickey Mouse and a short UNLV lanyard.

A small notepad with a fresh sheet of paper on the top; she'd send it down to Ronnie when they got back to the lab and see what he made of what had been written on it previously. Several pens, a few condoms and tampons, ticket stubs to movies and plays across town, another Luna bar, a small bottle of water, a bottle of antibacterial gel, and the purse was emptied.

"I haven't really got anything probative here," Sara announced, replacing the contents of the purse and entering the entire bag into evidence, then reaching for the necklace box while she talked. The twin masks of Comedy and Tragedy hung from a thin golden chain, and when she moved the box, something rattled. Prying up the cardboard liner, she found a diamond engagement ring. "Wait, no, I take that back. Looks like he was a Bible-quoting rose-sending fiancé. Whoever he is."

"Carter," Grissom supplied, holding up several envelopes. "Love letters," he added in explanation.

"She kept them here?" Sara screwed up her face in confusion.

He shrugged in response. "Maybe they gave her confidence before she went onstage." His tone suggested that was a shot in the dark. He wasn't really the kind of man who understood why you would write a love letter in the first place, much less keep and reread one.

"Yeah. Maybe. Anything else?"

"More of those Luna bars, a volume of Shakespeare's tragedies and a volume of his histories. She was missing the comedies, though."

"Aha," Sara said with a smile, holding up the evidence bag with the book she'd found. "They were on this side."

"Glad to know she had the complete collection," Grissom said with a slight smile. "That's all that was in this drawer, though."

"Besides the comedies and the jewelry, I have her purse, but there's nothing really telling in there other than her home address and the fact that she was probably a UNLV grad." She shrugged. "Like I said, nothing probative, but I bagged it anyway."

"Right." He pushed himself to a standing position using the chair, and she winced when she heard his back crack.

"Grissom," Warrick called from the door. "Nick and I finished in the green room, and I pulled a tape of the performance. Apparently we got lucky - it's not usually taped. Anything else back here?"

Grissom swiveled to take in the entire dressing room, seemingly lost in thought. "Brass should have a warrant for her apartment by now. Have an officer meet you there with it, and take Sara. I'm going to stay here and work with Catherine."

"Nick said that if you didn't need him, he was going to start transporting stuff back to the lab," Warrick suggested.

Grissom nodded. "Good idea. Sara - "

"I'll make sure he takes our evidence, too." She smiled saucily at him. "One step ahead of you, Griss. Warrick, this will just take a few minutes."

"I'll give you a hand," he suggested, and Sara loaded his arms with the bags of makeup and other items from the drawers and trash can, all to be tested for traces of the strychnine that had poisoned Bianca.

"Thanks," Sara said, and began to fill her own arms. "We'll call if we find anything," she promised, and gave him one last lingering smile before she exited the room.  



	5. Sign and Semblance Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I understand that," Brass said. So far, the man - Michael McKean, according to his notes - had been repeating variations on the same theme for the past five minutes, and there were still quite a few people left to interview. "I need you to focus. You're the stage manager. What do you do?"

"We've never had anything like this happen before," the thin, balding man asserted, and dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief even in the chill of the air conditioned room. "Never."

"I understand that," Brass said. So far, the man - Michael McKean, according to his notes - had been repeating variations on the same theme for the past five minutes, and there were still quite a few people left to interview. "I need you to focus. You're the stage manager. What do you do?"

"I make sure scenery is moved on and off stage at the proper times. I 'manage' the stage. Keep the actors quiet in the wings, work with the stagehands. It's a very important job," he added pompously.

"I'm sure," Brass muttered. "Where were you when Ms. Tolmen fainted?"

"In the wings, stage right. We needed to move the wedding scenery offstage, mop and sweep, and move the prison scenery onstage during intermission. I was standing with my crew waiting for the scene to finish."

"And what did you see?"

"It didn't seem like anything, at first." The handkerchief once again made its way to his forehead, and Brass amused himself by suddenly realizing how much McKean looked like Conrad Ecklie. "She just fainted. She was supposed to. Hero faints when Claudio accuses her, and she remains unconscious until he leaves. It's why he believes Benedick when he tells him she's dead."

"But Ms. Tolmen didn't wake up," Brass stated, wondering what kind of a name Hero was. Grissom would know, of that he was sure.

"No. I assumed she was just very deep into the character. She missed two lines." Of all the things Brass had heard McKean say so far, he seemed most distressed when relaying the fact that Bianca had missed her lines. "Until Colin and Joe had to carry her offstage, and then I lost sight of her."

"Okay, Mr. McKean, thank you for your help." Brass stood and closed his steno book with the three lines of notes he had taken.

"Can I go home now?" he asked. "My wife will be waiting up for me. She gets upset when I'm late."

Definitely henpecked, Brass thought to himself, and then smirked inwardly at the image of Ecklie being chased around a kitchen by a woman wielding a rolling pin. "We'll let you know, Mr. McKean."

Brass stood and made his way to where Catherine was talking to a woman in a fern green pantsuit, platinum blonde hair curled and coiffed carefully. She looked like a silent movie star, carefully outlined pouting lips and wide crystal blue eyes included.

Apparently the interview was just starting, and Brass hitched up his pants to sit down and watch. Out of all the CSIs, Catherine had a flair for the person-to-person interviewing process, and he'd tried more than once to suggest to her that she would make a very good detective. But she loved crime scene analysis too much to switch over. In the meantime, she bent the rules as much as possible and interviewed witnesses and suspects whenever she could. Brass would have been more upset, but Catherine was far too good at what she did.

"Ms. Calvert - " Catherine began.

"Josephine," the woman corrected lazily, shifting her eyes over to take in Brass's presence, and he was suddenly reminded of a snake flicking out its tongue to smell the air and test for new variables.

"Ms. Calvert," Catheine began again firmly, and Brass expanded his animal analogy to think of Catherine as an especially pernicious terrier.

It must be the theater's influence, because his imagination was definitely in overdrive tonight.

"You were next to Ms. Tolmen when she fainted?"

"As the script called for," Josephine demurred, steepling long white fingers against each other. "Stage directions for our production had Beatrice catching Hero and cradling her while Claudio accused her."

"So you caught and cradled," Catherine inferred.

"I did."

"What was your impression of Ms. Tolmen's condition?"

"She had fainted." Josephine shrugged fluidly. "It looked no different than any other person fainting. She paled, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she went limp in my arms. It was all I could do to stay upright." She paused and tilted her head to the side, considering. "I imagine it looked quite realistic from the audience's perspective, and until she missed her first line I was rather impressed myself."

"And after that?"

"Colin and Joseph carried her offstage, and I had to continue on in my scene with Richard."

"That would be Richard Ellory?" Brass interrupted, checking the program Jessica Keller had given him to work from to check off production members in the theater that night.

"Yes. He plays Benedick. We had our scene together, and by the time we came offstage, the ambulance had already arrived and taken Bianca away."

"And where is Mr. Ellory now?" Catherine asked.

"I haven't the slightest idea. He left very soon after that." The long, pale fingers now drummed against the armrest of the theater seat Josephine was lounging in. "I imagine by this hour of the night he's gone home, but one never knows with Richard."

Brass made a note to search out the missing actor as soon as possible. "Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to harm Ms. Tolmen?"

Josephine smiled in a tolerantly amused way. "Apart from her understudy? Ours is a cutthroat business, officer, and Bianca came to the role young, and ahead of several more experienced actresses. But she earned it. She was very, very good at what she did."

"And the understudy's name would be..." Catherine prompted, pen poised.

Those lazy eyelids flickered in slight surprise. "Surely you didn't take me seriously. I was merely giving an example."

"The name," Brass said firmly.

Blue eyes watched them both for a few seconds, and then a corner of Josephine's mouth turned ever so slightly upwards. "Mallory Smith. I'm afraid I don't know where she is now, either. She also left when the rest of the show was canceled."

"And why didn't you leave?" Catherine asked, and seemed genuinely curious.

For the first time, Brass detected a hint of warmth in the crystal eyes and slight smile. "Jessica insisted on waiting for the police to arrive, and I dislike going home to an empty bed."

"Ah." Catherine's voice was amused, as if she appreciated having been mistaken. "Thank you, Ms. Calvert."

"My pleasure." Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Have you ever tried the stage, Ms. Willows?"

"I danced," Catherine hedged, wary of where this line of questioning was leading.

"I thought as much," Josephine said, satisfied. "You move like a dancer."

"Thank you," Catherine said with a smile, and Brass had the distinct impression that some female bonding ritual had occurred entirely over his head. The criminalist and detective stood, leaving Josephine to return to the book she'd been reading before they approached.

"Well?" Brass asked, when they were out of earshot.

"She's a cool one," Catherine admitted, grudging admiration in her voice. "But I don't like her for it. She had nothing to gain."

"As far as we know." Brass looked around. For the most part, the only people who had stayed at the theater were stage crew who would have stayed after the play was over anyway to make sure the props were replaced and the scenery hadn't been damaged. Other officers were taking their statements with methodical procedure. Only two people who had been in a position to view Bianca's collapse remained. "Two left. Colin Amberly and Joseph Mountebank." He double-checked his program. "Senor Leonato and the Friar, respectively. They carried Ms. Tolmen offstage."

"I'll take Amberly," Catherine offered.

"Then I have Mountebank," Brass accepted, and pointed out Amberly for Catherine to talk to, approaching Mountebank himself.

"You have got to be kidding me," Greg said, staring at the fourth carton of evidence Nick set on the counter in front of him. "All of this?"

"We have to find out how she was poisoned before we can start looking for who poisoned her," Nick reminded him unnecessarily. "Calm down, okay? I'll help for a little while."

"A little while?" The note of dismay was no less. "Thanks ever so much."

"Or, hey, I could go help Archie with the tapes, or Ronnie with the QD stuff, or I could start matching the footprints Sara pulled, or..." Nick stood as if to leave, and Greg caught his sleeve.

"No, no, no," he said quickly. "Let's not be hasty. Remind me again what I'm looking for."

"Strychnine," Nick said, and Greg winced.

"Nasty stuff. Attacks the central nervous system, right?"

"You convulse, you suffocate, you die," Nick confirmed. "Not a pretty way to go at all. My grandfather had a cattle ranch - he used to bait carcasses with it to get rid of coyotes." He shivered in remembrance. "I was up staying with him one vacation when he took me out to set the traps. He had us ride a little ways off and wait. We weren't more than twenty yards away, but it had been a long winter and this coyote was practically starving to death, so he devoured the meat we'd left. He had nothing in his stomach; it went straight through his intestines into his blood. Ten, fifteen minutes tops, and he was gone."

Greg, meanwhile had pulled out a thick book from the cabinet, and was reading aloud. "Strychnine antagonizes the action of glycine, the amino acid responsible for transmitting inhibitory nerve impulses which control muscle contraction. In addition, there is an increase in brain levels of glutamic acid, an amino acid that acts as a transmitter for excitatory nerve impulses that excite muscle contraction. Skeletal muscles contract indiscriminately - a seizure. Convulsions prevent respiration, and the victim suffocates. Blech."

"Yeah," Nick agreed. "It's not even widely used as a pesticide anymore because it's considered inhumane. We need to find whoever thinks it's a good idea to use it on a human being."

Greg continued reading silently for a few seconds and shut the thick book, pushing himself back across the room to replace it on the shelf. "All right, what first?"

Nick reached into a carton and pulled out a tupperware half full of a rice dish. "This is as good a place to start as any."

Greg accepted the tupperware and, keeping it well away from his face, scraped out a sample. "Charge."  



	6. Sign and Semblance Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The apartment complex manager was nowhere to be found, despite repeated knocking on his door and calls made to his cell phone on the way to the building, so Warrick shrugged and threw his weight behind popping the lock out of the door.

Out of habit more than anything else, Sara rapped her knuckles against the door of apartment 14B. She and Warrick waited a minute, and then she shrugged. "Looks like no one's home."

The apartment complex manager was nowhere to be found, despite repeated knocking on his door and calls made to his cell phone on the way to the building, so Warrick shrugged and threw his weight behind popping the lock out of the door.

"Wait, wait," Vega told them, and edged his way into the apartment first, a procedural precaution that had both Sara and Warrick rolling their eyes in impatience. A few minutes later, he emerged and holstered his gun. "Clear."

Warrick gestured for Sara to precede him, and she reached back on her belt to retrieve her flashlight, flicking it on to illuminate the small apartment. Within a few seconds, she had located a light switch and flicked that on, replacing her flashlight.

Bianca Tolmen's living space was cozy and neat. The front door opened into a small living room and dining area space, with a table that seated four to the right of the door and a yard sale couch and small television and VCR on the left. Beyond the table, to the back right of the apartment, was a cupboard kitchen, to the left of which a door was slightly ajar. Sara pressed her fingertips against the wood and cracked it open a few more inches to reveal a cramped bedroom with two doors at the far left that probably led to a closet and bathroom.

"Your call," Sara told Warrick as he set his evidence kit down on the dining room table.

"I think I'll let you have the bedroom," he said. "I'll take the kitchen and outer area."

"Deal," she agreed, and opened the bedroom door the rest of the way, flicking the light on and setting her evidence kit down on the floor.

The bedroom was a contrast to the neatly arranged outer area; it was here that a bit more personality shone through. The sheets were rumpled, and the dresser was a jumble of framed photographs, makeup, perfume bottles, and odds and ends - a colored stone here, yet another ticket stub there, a silk scarf looped around a coin bank shaped like a red Crayola crayon, a porcelain unicorn with a chip from its golden horn, and a dish full of coins from other countries, a blown glass rose in a slim, clear flute of crystal, and a few scattered sheets of paper with half-crossed out to do lists on them.

It was clutter, but it was obviously well cared-for clutter. On the walls were reproductions of old movie posters - Casablanca, Kiss Me, Kate, and West Side Story. Over the bed was a framed lithograph, old and well-worn, of what Sara was pleased to recognize as the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.

The photographs on the dresser were of Venice, with the man Grissom had identified as Carter, her fiancé, of Bianca and a young man who looked strikingly like her - a brother, possibly even a fraternal twin by his age. There were a few of Bianca at childhood dance recitals and theater productions, and one of Bianca between three young men; one of them her brother, one of them Carter, and one of them unidentified, a thin man with blond hair and thick glasses. The photograph had obviously been taken years ago, and as Sara squinted, she was pretty sure that the building in the background was on the UNLV campus.

When she had finished going over the objects on the top of the dresser, she knelt down, opening her evidence kit and setting up the ALS. She reached behind her, flicked off the lights, and slid red goggles on, scanning the sheets slowly. Food stain, food stain - semen. Several semen stains, in fact, some of them more recent than others. Turning the lights back on, Sara bagged the sheets. If Bianca had had more than one lover - and if one of them hadn't been her fiancé - then they might have a great deal more motive to work with.

The nightstand held a well-read copy of the King James Bible and a diary, locked. With a grin of satisfaction, she bagged it. They could pick the lock at the lab, and hopefully be able to identify suspects from Bianca's writings.

There was nothing under the bed but dust bunnies and a stray pair of nylons. The closet didn't reveal anything particularly interesting; Sara took a few minutes and printed all her shoes to match against the prints she'd lifted from the dressing room. The bathroom was similarly uneventful - or at least it was until she opened the medicine cabinet.

Aspirin, prescription migraine medicine, antacid tablets, evening primrose oil for menstrual problems - and prescription folic acid. She smiled grimly and shook the bottle; it was about half full. Dropping it into a bag, Sara entered it into evidence and finished up looking through the cabinets without finding anything else particularly outstanding.

"Hey," Warrick called from the bedroom doorway. "I've got an address book and an answering machine tape with some interesting stuff on it; we'll have Archie take a look when we get back to the lab. You?"

Sara held up the clear bag with the prescription bottle. "I think Bianca Tolmen was pregnant."

After Sara left, Grissom turned back to the easy chair and frowned in thought. On a hunch, he took out an ALS and killed the lights, covering every inch of the carpet. There were several greasy stains that were probably makeup residue, some soda and other liquid stains, but things got very interesting when he turned the glow to the chair.

Semen and vaginal fluid stains, fresh enough to date from Bianca's tenure in this room. Reaching for his evidence kit, Grissom pulled out a swab, uncapping it and wetting the end with distilled water to take samples from each stain in turn, carefully marking the boxes and entering them into evidence.

With that, he turned the lights back on and did one last visual sweep of the room. Nothing caught his eye, and he closed the door and made sure the crime scene tape was carefully in place before picking up his evidence kit and the paper bag with the swabs, navigating his way by trial and error to the stairwell that led up to the stage.

Immediately, he winced at the lights, and tried to make his way across the echoing wood floor as quickly as possible. It took a certain emotional courage to stand on stage and expose oneself in front of hundreds of people every day, and Grissom admired anyone who chose to do it for a living. He was well aware that it was something he could never do.

The audience seats were almost empty except for two men in coveralls being interviewed by officers, and Brass and Catherine both talking to stout older men Grissom recognized as the actors who had played the Friar and Senor Leonato respectively. Making his way down the stairs that led to the center aisle, he decided to listen in on Brass's interrogation.

"Where did you bring Ms. Tolmen?"

The Friar - Grissom looked over Brass's shoulder and saw him identified as Joe Mountebank - cast his eyes downward in remembrance. "Down to the green room. She started convulsing right before we got there, and we almost dropped her. It was if all her muscles just - exploded. For such a skinny thing, I had no idea she could have that much strength. It took everything Colin and I had to hang onto her long enough to get her down. Someone had set out a blanket, and we put her on that. Thank God someone called 911 right away."

"Could you describe the seizures, Mr. Mountebank?" Grissom asked, and Brass jumped slightly and gave the entomologist a frustrated look.

"They were horrible," Joe said with a shiver. "Her whole body arched - the only parts touching the ground were her heels and the back of her head. Col and I had to lean our full weight on her to get her to straighten out. Her arms were straight, stiff as a board, and her fists were clenched so hard the nails were digging in to the skin and there was blood everywhere. Someone thought that she might be epileptic, and tried to open up her mouth to make sure she didn't swallow her tongue, but her teeth wouldn't budge she had her jaw shut so hard. Her eyes were wide open, and they were bulging..." He broke off, and looked away, shuddering. "I've never seen anything like it."

"And between seizures?"

"Completely limp. Her skin was clammy and cold, but she was sweating. We tried to wrap her in the blanket, but just when we could get it around her she went into convulsions again." Joe ran his hand through thinning gray hair, and shook his head. "It happened maybe five, six times, and finally the last time, she didn't come out of it. Her skin started to turn blue, and we tried pounding on her chest to get air into her, but she just couldn't breathe. The EMTs came right then, and they took her away." He hung his head. "They told me that she's still alive?"

"Barely," Grissom said bluntly, and then thought better of it and decided not to tell the man that while the EMTs had been able to stop the seizures through intravenous injections of anticonvulsant drugs, they hadn't been in time. Her brain had gone without oxygen too long and was severely damaged. At this point, she existed only through a ventilator, and her heart had been so weakened by the violence of the repeated seizures there wasn't much hope she would hold on more than forty-eight hours.

"God," Joe whispered, and ran his hand through his hair again. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I really need a drink."

Brass snorted. "I can understand completely, Mr. Mountebank. Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Bianca?"

He shrugged. "I barely knew her. We only had a few scenes together, so I wasn't here for all the rehearsals, and even the ones I was here for, I rarely stayed the whole time. I'm only working part-time now that my wife's retired. This season was going to be my last."

Brass nodded. "If you remember anything, here's my card. Feel free to call."

"I will," Mountebank promised.

"Just one last question, Mr. Mountebank," Grissom interrupted. "Were you aware that Bianca Tolmen had a fiancé?"

"I knew she wore an engagement ring, but I didn't ask her about it."

"Was she close to any of the male actors?"

"I'd say Rich, and Scott." He cleared his throat. "Sorry, that's Richard Ellory, who plays Benedick, and Scott Loring, who plays Claudio. I saw her a couple of times with other cast members, too. The younger ones - Bianca, Scott, and a few others, they used to go out for twenty-four hour breakfasts after late rehearsals. Scott would be the person to ask about that, but he had to go straight home. His sister's very ill, and lives with him."

Grissom watched the man for a moment, and decided to try his next question. "Would you be willing to give a DNA sample?"

"A what?" Joe was genuinely stunned. "Why?"

"To exclude you from our list of suspects," Grissom said, but didn't offer more than that.

Joe stared at him for a few seconds. "Sure, I guess. I mean, I didn't have anything to do with it, other than helping her offstage and sitting with her until the EMTs got there."

"Then this will serve to prove that," Grissom reassured him, and took out a swab. "Open your mouth." He scraped the inside of Joe's cheek. "Thank you."

"You're free to go," Brass told him, and the stout man nodded and stood to leave. "Scott Loring," he said out loud, writing the name down on the steno pad. "I've already got Richard Ellory tagged. We're going to keep the day shift beat cops plenty busy tracking down all the people who were involved with this."

"Make sure they get DNA samples, too."

"What was that all about?"

"Semen stains on the chair in Bianca Tolmen's dressing room indicate that she was...involved with someone in the cast. It could have been her fiancé, but it's better to cast the net wide to make sure." Grissom stood and brought his evidence kit over to where Catherine was interviewing the man who had played Senor Leonato, Colin Amberly.

He remembered Sara's voice reading the flyer with a smile. It had only been six hours ago at the most, but it already seemed like a lifetime away. He hadn't imagined then that he would ever actually need to remember that fact beyond the three hours of the play, and noted the occasion as one more proof of the time-honored "you never know" theory.

"She was a dear girl, a very dear girl. I can't imagine anyone holding a grudge against her," Colin was saying, shaking his head in sorrow. "No one was happier than I when she won the role. So much talent!"

"Ms. Calvert seemed to suggest that there were quite a few people who would be interested in having that role instead of her," Catherine posited.

"Josephine and Bianca were like oil and water," Colin said sourly. "Or, better to say, fire and ice. If you've already interviewed Josephine then you understand that analogy." Grissom frowned, but Catherine was nodding knowingly. "In that way, they were well suited for the roles they played. The jaded, older woman and the young girl in the throes of romantic love."

"I wouldn't say Beatrice was jaded," Grissom argued. "Cynical, perhaps, but I believe the eventual theme of the play was that even through that cynicism she found her own particular type of love and it was no less deep than Hero's."

"It's a point of debate, Mr..." Colin deliberately left the sentence hanging.

"Grissom," he filled in. "Gil Grissom. I'm also with the crime lab."

"Mr. Grissom. Josephine is an actress, and it isn't for naught that she's the first lady of the company. But she could never have brought Hero to life the way Bianca did."

"Artistic debates aside," Catherine interrupted, "are you saying there was trouble between Ms. Calvert and Ms. Tolmen?"

"Trouble is a relative term. Bianca disapproved of Josephine's...lifestyle choice, and to a certain extent, Josephine disapproved of Bianca's. They are - were - both high-spirited, passionate women." Colin smiled briefly. "With the stress of a theater production as large and well-known as this, small disagreements almost always become larger than they truly are, and in the end, it's better to let them out and put them in the past."

"You're going to have to explain that a little better," Brass said flatly. "Lifestyle choice?"

"Josephine's relationship with Jessica is common knowledge, and has been for years. Bianca is a devout Christian, and while she never said anything explicit, it was clear that on religious grounds, she disapproved of that relationship. As for the vice versa - Bianca did not always, shall we say, practice what she preached. I know of at least two affairs she was holding simultaneously with members of the cast - before you ask, no, I will not betray their confidences - and Josephine disapproved of that."

"And Ms. Tolmen's fiancé? What did he think of those affairs?"

Colin swiveled his head to look at Grissom. "You would have to ask him yourself, Mr. Grissom. As far as I know, Carter was not aware of them."

"Carter." Catherine pounced. "Do you know him?"

"Only by name," Colin said. "If you don't have any more questions, I've already stayed here far too long, and my wife will be worried."

"You're free to go, Mr. Amberly," Catherine said with a nod.

"Not just yet," Grissom interrupted. "May we take a DNA sample?"

Colin's eyes narrowed. "If you must."

Grissom swabbed the inside of his cheek. "Thank you. Now you're free to go."

When he had left, the two criminalists and the detective were left sitting in the seats, Brass and Grissom side by side and Catherine in the row in front, leaning against the backs of the chairs with her arms crossed.

"He was too ready to pin it on Calvert," Catherine said first, breaking the thoughtful silence.

"And he was hiding something else," Grissom added, studying the swab box with Colin Amberly's DNA inside. "He may have just given us the key to what it was."  



	7. Sign and Semblance Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He paused between returning the compact to its evidence bag and reaching for another. "You don't think it's weird? Grissom and Sara?"

Nick opened the next evidence bag and prepared a sample for Greg, scraping powder from the compact, keeping it well away from his nose and mouth. He passed the powder over to Greg, who finished preparing it for the chromatograph test. They'd been going through evidence for the past four and a half hours, and now had a routine down.

He paused between returning the compact to its evidence bag and reaching for another. "You don't think it's weird? Grissom and Sara?"

"I try not to think about it," Greg said, his back to Nick as he slid the sample in the lab machine. "It's been a while now, anyway."

"Yeah." Nick still made no move to take the tupperware. "Still, though...I dunno."

Silence reigned for a few more minutes, and Nick rested his chin on his fists as he leaned forward and frowned in thought. Greg finally turned from the machine to sit opposite him and changed the subject. "Found a new hack for GTA4 the other day."

"Yeah?" Nick asked, instantly curious.

"It's under the suspended bridge in the San Francisco course." He began describing the route to take to discover the hidden vehicle, and continued talking even when the chromatograph beeped a negative response. They chatted like that for a few more minutes, and then fell to silence again.

Nick pulled over the next carton, and reached in to take out a paper bag that was significantly larger than the other evidence bags they had been dealing with. And, wonder of wonders, it was the last thing in that carton. "I think we're done. We've only got whatever this is left."

"Nice," Greg said, as the chromatograph once again beeped a negative. "Because we're out of options. Process of elimination..."

Nick reached in and pulled out the roses. "What the..."

They both sat and stared at the flowers.

"Uhm, I'm going to guess she neither ate that nor used it as makeup," Greg finally ventured. He paused thoughtfully. "Although you can, you know. They put candied rose petals on pastries, and I was at this club once where this girl was wearing - "

Nick interrupted hastily. "They must have gotten mixed up." He slid the roses back into the bag. "I guess I'll let Grissom know that it doesn't look like it was oral. I don't know how else then. Needles? Could have been injected by someone on the scene. But you'd think she would have noticed that."

"Hey, that's your job to figure out," Greg pointed out. "Mine is not to wonder why."

Nick snorted and picked up a carton of food to put it back in a refrigerated evidence locker.

When they return to the lab, Warrick and Sara parted, Warrick to check with Archie on progress on the tape from the theater and to give him the new answering machine tape, and Sara to the layout room, where she spread Bianca's pale lavender sheets out across the backlit table.

Flicking the lights off and rendering the use of the backlight null and void, Sara began to examine the sheets inch by inch, swabbing each semen stain and marking it. There were a fair number, and soon she had a half dozen swab boxes piled up. She was about to set that sheet aside when a bit of brownish-beige dust near the hem caught her attention.

Frowning, she tapelifted it and held it up to the light. To the naked eye, it appeared to match the residue she and Grissom had lifted from the dressing room. Now that it was starting to occur in preponderance, that made it a high priority. If they could divine properties specific to the material - whatever it was - then they could begin to link it to a specific suspect who had been in both Bianca's dressing room and her bed.

Then again, it could also belong to Bianca, but Sara told herself to think optimistically.

Sheets duly swabbed, Sara set them aside and began the tedious job of comparing the shoe prints she'd made at the apartment to the prints she'd lifted from the crime scene. Twenty minutes later, she had identified two of the seven prints from the crime scene as coming from shoes Bianca herself owned - a pair of knee-high chocolate brown leather boots and a pair of high-end jogging sneakers.

Two of the prints from the crime scene were from the same pair of shoes - a right and a left - which meant that they were only looking for four more types of shoes. At least two of them were very definitely masculine, probably dress shoes, a third was distinctly feminine with a thin, spiked heel, and the third was an ambiguous sneaker tread. Sara cleaned up the layout table and set the electrostatically lifted prints aside in a pile. When she'd returned the sheets to their paper bag, she balanced everything in her arms.

A trip to the evidence lockers disposed of everything except the lifted shoeprints and the fingerprints, and humming, Sara set out to apply herself to the mindless task of running prints through the appropriate databases. It was numbing work, but there was a certain satisfaction in getting it out of the way and being able to narrow the focus of the case, winnowing through the evidence until they had the piece of the eventual puzzle that would tell them what had happened to Bianca Tolmen.

"Of the twenty-five people who are in this production, twenty were onstage when Ms. Tolmen collapsed," Brass read from his notes. Catherine was still learning against the back of the row in front of him; Grissom had wandered off to examine the stage for himself, but was keeping an ear open to their discussion. She was trying not to be offended by the fact that he felt the need to review the scene personally.

"We've interviewed three of them so far - Josephine Calvert, Colin Amberly, and Joe Mountebank. The only people left who were close to Ms. Tolmen who are left to interview are Richard Ellory, Scott Loring, and Violet DuMarne."

"And how many had access to the dressing room?" Grissom asked from where he stood, hands in pockets, looking up at the window of the light and sound booth high above the audience.

"According to Ms. Keller, anyone who had access to the backstage," Brass said, flipping back a few pages. "Actors, production personnel, ushers, other theater staff, even a few guests, as long as they were with someone who did have access." Before Grissom could ask, he added "We're working on a list of who that is. Beat cops will be out first thing to interview everyone and find out if they had any guests, and if they noticed anyone looking suspicious."

"What about the people we've already interviewed?" Catherine queried.

"None of them saw anything out of the ordinary," Brass said. "Something interesting, though - two people said that Bianca Tolmen had gone out with Scott Loring for dinner that night, and that they arrived together."

"Strychnine shows symptoms within fifteen minutes to a half hour. The poisoning occurred somewhere within this theater," Grissom dismissed.

"Still, motive," Catherine pointed out. "Any news on the fiancé yet? Maybe he's the jealous type."

"Not a word," Brass replied, shaking his head. "We only know his first name and the fact that he existed - which is apparently more than most of the people here knew."

"We need a name," Grissom said irritably, stating the obvious as he descended the steps.

Catherine considered pointing out how cranky he was all of a sudden, and asking if it had anything to do with his interrupted date, but decided it would be safer to keep quiet for now. Hopefully by the next shift he would be in a better mood.

"Well, either way, it's going to take us the rest of the shift just to get back to get back to the lab, with all the morning rush hour traffic. We'll see how the analysis is going, call it a night, and hope that the interviews during the day turn up something more interesting." Not to mention she wanted to get home before Lindsey had to go to school and make sure she was well enough to go. She'd been well enough that Catherine had been able to leave her at the night care, but still complaining of a tummy ache.

Grissom took one last look around, and nodded in agreement.

"Wait, there," Warrick said, pointing to the screen. "This must be the beginning of the scene where she fainted. Looks like a wedding to me."

Archie shrugged. "I'll slow it down."

Claudio inched across the stage as he made his entrance, as he accused Hero, and as she fell backward into Beatrice's arms with an almost comical slowness, and there the tape was paused.

"How much resolution can you get?"

"Depends on if I can find the right algorithm," the A/V tech murmured, his fingers flying across the complicated controls. The view on the screen lurched, zoomed in, and pixilated almost indistinguishably. After a few seconds, Warrick watched as red bars began to sweep the screen, restoring the image to a semblance of visibility.

"If?" Warrick prompted.

"I worded that badly," Archie clarified. "I'll find the right algorithm, but I don't know if it'll be right enough for you. There's only so much you can do with tape of this poor quality and a recording from that distance."

The bars continued to sweep the screen, and slowly, Bianca's limp body became visible, taking up the entire area where she was draped across Beatrice's - Josephine's - knees. Her face was slack, and there was no doubt by the way her dead weight hung that she was truly unconscious.

"Okay," Warrick said slowly, thinking aloud. "Back up to right before she faints. I want you to follow her as she falls - I want to be able to see the irises in her eyes."

"I can't work miracles," Archie objected, but the tape was already in slow rewind. Bianca's limbs returned to life, and she staggered forward instead of backward to stand once more in front of Claudio, the coronet of flowers that had been knocked off in the fall zooming back to rest on her head.

"All prior evidence to the contrary. C'mon, man, this should be a piece of cake for you."

Archie snorted, but didn't deny the praise. It was true that he was exceptionally good at what he did, and he proved it as he cleaned the image repeatedly, applying algorithm after algorithm to coax more and more detail out of the tape.

Finally, they were able to see Bianca's face smiling at Claudio in perfect clarity. Archie had enhanced the tape so much that the design in the lace from the collar of her dress was visible.

"All right, now advance at one-quarter speed," Warrick instructed, and Archie flicked a switch.

They watched in silence as the smile plastered on Bianca's face remained unchanged for a few seconds, and then her eyes began to flit rapidly; presumably, she was looking from person to person onscreen. But there was something entirely too quick about the way her eyes focused and unfocused, as if she were trying to take in everything at once. She blinked, rapidly.

"Sensory overload," Warrick theorized. "First symptoms of strychnine poisoning." It was obvious that the actress was trying to fight the impulses of her own body. Something to her right caught her attention, and her turn to address it was just a shade too fast. She turned back so that she was once again fully facing the camera - it had only been a split second onstage, but with the slowed tape speed they could see every step that led to her turn back around. Now her lip was caught between her teeth ever so slightly, and while the smile was still on her face, it seemed painted on, as if she were smiling only by dint of incredible effort.

"Pause," Warrick said abruptly, and leaned forward. "What do you think - is she sweating?"

"Could be," Archie said. "Or it could be reflected from the stage lights. Anyway, even if she is sweating, it wouldn't be that unusual. Have you ever been on stage under full lights? It gets insanely hot."

"You've done theater?" the CSI asked in surprise, curious. Out of all the lab techs, Archie was of the last one he would have imagined acting.

The other man huffed out a soft snort. "Sort of. My girlfriend freshman year in high school got cast in the school musical, and they were short on help. She had me volunteer to be a techie." There was a slight smile of fond remembrance. "They stuck me on the sound board. It was how I got into doing all this."

"And the girl?" Warrick asked, smiling.

"Eh, she left me for the senior who played the lead. I got over it pretty quickly." He patted the side of the video board.

Warrick stared for a second, and then shook himself and turned back to the screen. Archie followed suit and set the video in motion once again.

There was only so much that could be done with the simple VHS tape, and the blurring caused by the movement of the computer focus as it tried to follow Bianca's fall made details negligible. They could recognize Bianca's face, but only barely. Within a split second after she landed, however, the focus and pixellation had readjusted and they were once again able to see her unconscious face in clear detail, and the tape continued to run. The only movement was the occasional shift of her head as Josephine's shoulder shook underneath it.

"What can you get me of that?" Warrick asked, tapping at a small white square of pixel that appeared at the edge of Bianca's lips.

Archie shrugged, and the computer once again zoomed in, but only slightly. "That's it."

The CSI craned his head. "Could be foaming."

"Or it could be an impurity in the tape," the tech pointed out. "With this quality, I'm not making any promises." He let the tape run for a few more seconds to see if anything changed. If the white pixel had disappeared, it might have been evidence in favor of a fault on the part of the recording.

Something shifted, slightly, but Warrick couldn't put his finger on what. He looked from the white spot down to her jaw and found it - the muscles were clenched tightly. Lockjaw, another early sign of strychnine poisoning. "Back up so we can see her whole body."

Once again, they looked at Bianca's body cradled in Josephine's arms. There was a marked difference in the posture from the first time they had seen it - they were now nearly at the end of the scene. Whereas before the musculature had been limp and supple, as befitted a body in an unconscious state, now it was markedly stiff. It wouldn't have been apparent to anyone even five feet away, and definitely not to anyone as far away as the first row of the audience.

But from his privileged seat made possible by state of the art computer technology, Warrick was able to tick off another sign of strychnine poisoning - bodily stiffness. The poison was beginning to interfere with the nervous system's responses. What would very soon be violent and uncontrollable flexions of the skeletal muscles was now evident only in the involuntary contraction of sufficient muscles to freeze limbs.

"There is no way they didn't notice that," he said angrily. "Stiffening after fainting is a huge red flag for a more serious problem."

Archie merely shrugged. "The show must go on."  



	8. Sign and Semblance Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sara was setting yet another fingerprint on the scanner and looked up with a smile. "Nick. Hey. Any luck with the food and makeup?"

"Yo, Sara." Nick thrust his head in the doorway to the print lab, balancing his palm against the metal doorframe.

Sara was setting yet another fingerprint on the scanner and looked up with a smile. "Nick. Hey. Any luck with the food and makeup?"

He shook his head. "Not so much as a hiccup on any of the tests, which leads me to believe the poison wasn't ingested. While I remember, what was up with those roses you marked into evidence?"

She furrowed her brow at him. "We found them in the trash can in the dressing room. That's a little out of place, so I collected them...why?"

"Nothing in particular. They ended up in the boxes of evidence to test for strychnine residue."

"Weird."

"Yeah." A shrug. "It happens. What're you up to?"

Sara held up the print she had just taken from the scanner. "Prints from the dressing room. Shot in the dark, since we don't even have the victim's prints to eliminate from her own dressing room yet, but..."

He nodded. "Listen, what's up next to process? I haven't seen anything but food and makeup for the past five hours. I have no idea about the rest of what you all have brought in."

She set the AFIS search to begin with a click of the mouse and leaned her hip against the table to look back up at him. "White powder from the dressing room easy chair. Beige residue from both the carpet in the dressing room and the sheets from the victim's apartment. Black and white fibers, also from the easy chair in the apartment. I sent some stuff down to QD - you could always go encourage Ronnie to get to it. He was whining about a backlog from days when I dropped it off." She ticked off each piece of evidence on her fingers. "And paper trail and research, of course."

"Much as I appreciate Greg's company, five hours with the gas chromatograph was a little too much quality time," Nick said with a smirk. "I'll take the fiber."

"I'm almost done here, and I've already scanned the shoeprints through, so I'll do the powder and residue." The computer beeped out a negative, and she reached for another lifted print to center it on the scanner. "Grissom and Catherine back yet?"

"No. Haven't heard anything, either. They're probably caught in traffic," he said, trailing off and looking up into her eyes, gathering himself to speak again. Sara had the distinct sense that he was going to ask a question she didn't want to answer.

"Fiber's logged in already, and we pulled an exemplar from the carpet in the dressing room for exclusion," she prompted quickly, clicking to start the search yet again, and he nodded.

"I'm on it."

AFIS beeped negative again, and Sara glared at the computer screen.

Grissom answered his cell phone on the first ring, hoping it was someone from the lab calling with a break in the evidence.

"Gil," the sheriff's faux-cheerful voice greeted him.

"Brian," he answered, not bothering to hide his displeasure. "What can I do for you?"

"They tell me you're working on the death of that actress," Mobley began. "I just wanted to call and see how that's coming along."

"We've only had the case for six hours," Grissom pointed out, and restrained from asking which one of Mobley's political cronies had an interest in this case. The sherriff never called him out of pure scientific curiosity. "I'm not yet prepared to offer any conclusions."

"Of course you aren't." Mobley's tone was conciliatory. "I just wanted to take the time to see how everything was going."

"It's going fine," Grissom said curtly, now thoroughly confused and suspicious. Catherine was constantly reminding him of his total lack of political acumen, but this was so odd as to set even his limited radar buzzing.

"Glad to hear that." There was a pause. "Well. You have a good night, then - or, I should say, morning."

He didn't bother to wait for Grissom to reply, and the entomologist folded the phone shut on a dial tone with a frown.

"What was that all about?" Catherine asked from the driver's seat as they pulled into the parking lot behind the crime lab.

"I have no idea," Grissom admitted. "He said he just wanted to 'see how everything was going.'"

Catherine pursed her lips in thought. "That is odd." At his exasperated sigh, she turned to look at him after putting the Tahoe into park. "Politic, Gil. Politic."

"Yeah," he grunted, frustrated that Brian Mobley should be occupying even a fraction of the metal energy that should be devoted to finding out who had poisoned Bianca Tolmen.

One hand on the focusing knob of the microscope, Nick began to jot down notes about the fiber he currently had at 400X magnification.

To the naked eye, and to a certain extent under the magnifying effect of the microscope, the fiber was white, kinked, and coarse. It probably had no small amount of artificial fabric woven in to it - tightly woven, at that. On closer inspection, it was of a heft and weave often associated with rugs.

The carpet in the dressing room had been dark blue, but Nick still lifted fibers for comparison. If he didn't have paperwork documenting that he had, indeed, scientifically proven that the white fibers were not in any way, shape, or form the same as the blue carpet, a defense lawyer would jump all over it. It was one of the realities of the job, and one of the first lessons anyone working in forensics learned: do not accord courts the power of common sense.

It was the same with his hunch, on removing both fibers from the double microscope, that the white fiber came from a carpet. He had years of experience as a CSI, and a great deal of specialization in hair and fiber analysis, but his judgment would only go so far. If and until they could match the fiber with an exemplar, it would remain unidentified.

Pushing aside the uncharacteristically cynical thoughts, Nick brought the black fiber up on the slide and began taking notes on that.

The differences were marked. This was thinner, finely woven, and definitely not artificial. It was soft, and slid silkily across his fingers even through the latex of the glove. The microscope only offered him further proof of his suspicions - natural fiber, probably rubbed off a fabric such as a sweater. It had also been dyed black, and well-dyed at that. Whatever the garment was, it was a high quality one.

Rebagging both fibers, he glanced at his watch. 6:45 AM. Shift was over in fifteen minutes.

He decided he had enough time, and headed in the direction of Greg's lab to check on Sara and submit the fibers for chemical analysis.

"Cops like to eat them - or at least that's the stereotype," Greg said, steepling his fingers and leaning on his elbows across the lab table.

Sara just stared at him. "Doughnuts? Greg, what do doughnuts have to do with a white powder that might be strychnine residue?"

"Everything," he said, taking a falsely affronted tone and whipping out the results sheet with a flourishing gesture.

"Sugar," Sara read, recognizing the chemical formula instantly. She looked up with a frown. "That doesn't make any sense. Bianca Tolmen was a health nut. This isn't even pure sugar - it's got all sorts of additives in it." She scanned the list, nodding as she recognized each chemical. This sugar was only one or two steps up from Sweet'n'Low.

"Exactly," Greg said, nodding. "It's powdered sugar, to be exact. Now, I like to be thorough, so I did a little bit of research. This kind of powdered sugar is often used to coat those doughnuts you can buy in bulk at any grocery store. I'm still working on a brand."

"So someone was eating doughnuts while sitting in that chair," Sara mused aloud. "That powder gets everywhere." She bid a fond adieu to the hope that they had identified the source of the poison, but then remembered that Grissom had been the one to collect the powder. The thought of him anywhere near poison residue that could wreak that kind of havoc on the human body made her stomach turn.

"Unfortunately, there's no way to tell how long ago," Greg said with a shrug.

"We'll have to see how often the room is cleaned, and how thoroughly. And how long that chair's been there. And if anyone in the cast eats sugar-coated doughnuts." Sara's mind was racing ahead, and she rested her chin in her a hand as she paced slowly in front of Greg's table.

"You said you had more residue for me?" Greg prompted, interrupting her train of thought.

She blinked and looked up. "Ah - yes." She slid the tape-lifted samples forward. "I'm pretty sure they're the same material, whatever it is. Found in both the dressing room and the victim's sheets."

Greg raised an eyebrow. "Somebody's been eating crackers in bed," he said in a mock-reproachful tone, and she gave him an undecipherable look. "Right."

He prepared the sample and slid it into the gas chromatograph. Sara set the first results printout down and crossed her arms, still pacing and lost in thought.

"Hey," Warrick said from the doorway. "How's it going?"

"No strychnine in the food or makeup, two footprints eliminated, no matches in AFIS on prints, and our white powder from the dressing room is sugar," Sara summarized quickly. "You?"

"Played around with the recording from the theater," Warrick said. "She began showing symptoms five to ten minutes before she collapsed onstage, and her muscles started to seize up while she was in direct physical contact with two of the actors. There's no way they couldn't have noticed it."

"It wasn't visible from the audience," Sara mused, considering. It was her first overt reference to the fact that she'd been a member of that audience, and Greg and Warrick exchanged a glance over her head that she noted with an inward sigh. "And they just...left her lying there?"

"Looks like," he responded, disgust evident in his voice. "We're going to go over the answering machine tape later."

"You never told me what was so interesting about it," Sara remembered suddenly. They'd both been so startled by the revelation of Bianca's possible pregnancy that Warrick's statement about the answering machine tape had gone unremarked.

"Fifteen messages since two PM that afternoon," he said, leaning back against a table opposite Greg's and crossing his arms. The lab tech was watching their brainstorming session intently and quietly, soaking up all he could about a CSI's mental process. "Twelve of them from the same guy, at least to the naked ear. We're going to need to run a voice comparison to make sure. There was no caller ID on the phone."

"The fiancé?" Sara guessed.

"Maybe. Whoever he was, he never identified himself with a name, just 'It's me.' Two other calls were from someone who identified himself as Scott, and the third was from the library letting her know an inter-library loan book she'd ordered had come in," he detailed.

"Scott Loring," she said suddenly. "He was in the play...I remember his name from the program. I don't remember who he played, though."

"Well, it looked like they were trying to meet up for dinner. His first message was a suggestion to get together, and his second was to name a time and say that he'd try her cell." Warrick paused in thought. "If she checked the messages from her cell phone, then the answering machine wouldn't have marked them as already listened to, maybe. So she got the first message, called him back, left a message, and then answered his call back on her cell phone. Either way, her fiancé - assuming that's who it was - was worried enough to leave twelve messages."

"Tone of voice?"

"Started off curious, went to worried, and by the last one I'd say it was definitely approaching frantic. He didn't start calling until about six PM, either, so that's twelve messages in...we were there around what, two? Twelve messages in eight hours."

"That's a little beyond frantic," Sara said, her eyes narrowing. "I'd say we have a suspect."

"If we can find out who he is," Warrick pointed out. "I passed on the contact information from the address book to the PD, and let them know we need a trace on the line."

Sara nodded, but before she could answer, the chromatograph beeped. Nick rapped his knuckles on the doorframe and entered just as Greg was pulling the sheet from the printer.

"What, do I have an audience now?" Greg joked.

All three CSIs looked at him: Sara slightly amused but more concerned with the results, Warrick just impatient, and Nick a bit confused as to what he'd just walked in on.

"Hey guys," Nick said by way of introduction. "Which is that?"

"Beige residue." Sara turned back to Greg. "Well?"

He opened and closed his mouth, as if he'd thought better about playing one of his word games. "Sawdust."

"Is that the sample from the bed or the theater?" Sara asked.

"Bed."

"She had sawdust in her bed?" Nick asked incredulously.

"Check it against the - " Warrick began, but Greg held up one hand to forestall the rest of the sentence. The other was busy with a pipette, preparing the next sample.

"Way ahead of you," the tech said mischievously as he slid the next sample in and started it. "So, sawdust. Kinky."

Nick stared. "I don't even want to know, Sanders."

"It would have made sense in the theater," Sara said, reaching over to take the printout from where Greg had set it down. "From the sets, or...something. But sawdust in the bedsheets?"

"Maybe she has a woodworking hobby," Nick suggested.

Warrick was shaking his head. "Nothing in her apartment about it - no tools, no books." He paused, reflecting. "There were a few art pieces that looked hand-carved, though."

Nick started suddenly. "Hey, what about the other sample?"

"Sugar," Sara filled him in. "From a powdered doughnut."

"That's...random."

"Yeah."

Sara was reading further down on the printout. "Any chance you can tell what kind of wood this came from?"

Greg tipped his head, considering. "Give me a little more time."

Nick took the opportunity to set the two plastic evidence bags with the different fibers down on the counter. "This needs to be identified."

"It'll have to wait until next shift," Greg pointed out, and at the CSI's look, held his hands up in defense. "Hey, I don't make the rules. Ecklie sent out a memo about overtime, and CC'd it to the sherriff."

Sara's grimace made it very clear what her stance was on that topic, and Warrick muttered something under his breath about the dubious quality of the day shift supervisor's parentage.

Before they could stew any further, a beep signaled the end of analysis, and Greg handed over the printout with a shrug. "Same stuff."

"Preponderance of evidence," Warrick said, looking over Sara's shoulder as she held the two identical printouts side by side.

"We'll go back to the apartment tonight and double-check for any woodworking equipment," she decided.

"Well, it's seven-thirty, and I'm beat. Warrick, man, you up for breakfast?"

"Sure. Sara?"

She smiled slightly. "Sorry, guys, I've got plans."

Nick looked distinctly pained, and ducked his head to try and hide his expression from Sara. "See you tonight, then."

Grissom opened his office door to find Sara sitting on his couch, legs curled up underneath her, nose deep in a book. He was several steps in and nearly next to her before she looked up with a start.

"Hey," she said with a grin.

"What are you reading?" he asked, craning his neck around as he set his binder down on his desk.

She tilted the cover so he could read it more easily - a complete collection of Shakespeare's comedies. "I grabbed it from your shelf. We never did get to see the ending."

"You're not at the ending, though," he observed.

"You always end with a jade's trick. I know you of old," Sara quoted softly, and when she looked up, he was completely caught in her eyes. For a few heartbeats, they were both silent, and Grissom felt a slow smile creep across his face. She ducked her head, blushing slightly. "Anyway, it felt like cheating to just skip to the last scene we saw."

He nodded, understanding completely. "Why are you still here? I thought you'd gone home."

She shrugged slightly. "Empty bed," she said by way of explanation.

The idea that she hadn't simply gone back to her own apartment to sleep, that she had put off catching up on her lost hours of sleep from the day before in favor of coming home with him, warmed him inside. "Let's go, then."

She read silently for a few more minutes while he gathered his coat, and then slid the book into her bag, pausing for a moment to look up at him. "All right if I borrow this?"

"Of course. I have another copy at home, though, if you want to leave that here."

"I started with this copy, now I need to finish with this copy. It's a thing." She gave him an embarrassed little half-smile, and in a rare moment in his life, he wished he were anywhere but in his office, so he could see what that adorable twist of her lips tasted like.

Instead, he had to content himself with a feather touch at the small of her back as he guided her out to the parking lot. He remembered what the soft skin had felt like the night before when he'd come across her in the lab, leaning over intently in study, the hem of her shirt hitching up just enough to expose the half-inch of bare curve. The temptation had proved too much, and it had boosted his male ego to know that just touching her had made her react like that.

They always took both cars, even when they spent the day together - something that was rapidly becoming a habit, the only variation being in whose bed they slept. Their schedules were simply too varied and unpredictable to count on always being able to go together. If it hadn't been for the month coming to a close at the end of the week, and overtime restriction at its height, there was a good chance neither of them would have seen the other for several more hours.

So, while he felt slightly guilty at leaving the lab with a hot case still open, Grissom was silently appreciative of the bean counting that meant he had found Sara in his office and was now guiding her to her car, parked a few spaces down from his. It was an issue they both understood implicitly. While they would work without complaint, take overtime without hesitation, and go without seeing each other for days at a time with only a resigned shrug, there was always a background relief when outside factors took matters out of their hands. Most couples would have crumbled under the strain, but it was never something they'd even discussed. It just worked.

That didn't mean the case wasn't still weighing on them, however.

"Any suspects?" Sara asked, sliding her sunglasses on top of her head as she followed him in the cool darkness of the townhouse.

"Nothing immediate," Grissom said, dropping his keys on the table and going over to turn the air conditioning down as Sara flicked the lights on. "Motive, certainly. An understudy. A rival actress."

"A jealous fiancé," Sara added to his list, taking a seat on one of the bar stools as he passed her a glass of orange juice. "Thanks. Warrick pulled the answering machine tape. There were twelve messages over a period of eight hours from someone we've got pegged as the fiancé, though he never identified himself. The PD should be getting the phone records for us to look at. And there were two messages from someone named Scott, asking about going out to dinner that night."

"Scott Loring," Grissom supplied, sitting down next to her with a glass of tomato juice.

"That's what his name is!" she exclaimed.

"We have two witnesses from the theater who said they went out to dinner and arrived together."

"He was in the play, right?" she ventured.

"He played Claudio."

"Right. The gullible one." Her tone was dry and dismissive.

He snorted slightly. "He was being manipulated by Don John."

"Still, though. He should have trusted her. If you ask me, Beatrice and Benedick are a much better couple."

Grissom hid his small smile, and turned to rest his chin on his left hand, elbow on the counter. "Why?"

"It's a meeting of the minds. They actually talk. Claudio and Hero just look at each other like cows the whole play."

"Cows?" He couldn't resist the short laugh.

"Cows." She grinned impishly, and this time he leaned forward to taste it.  



	9. Sign and Semblance Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "A little," Lindsey said, yawning and bringing a fist up to her eyes to rub away the sleep as she sat up slightly. "My tummy still feels yucky, though."

"Hey, sweetie," Catherine said, leaning forward and wrapping her arms around Lindsey's small body. For a few seconds she just concentrated on how good and how simple it felt to be holding her daughter, drinking in the clean scent of her flyaway blonde hair. She pulled back and kissed her forehead. "Are you feeling any better?"

"A little," Lindsey said, yawning and bringing a fist up to her eyes to rub away the sleep as she sat up slightly. "My tummy still feels yucky, though."

"Yeah?" Catherine asked, reaching up to brush bangs out of beautiful blue eyes. "How yucky?"

"Pretty yucky," she decided. "Not as yucky as yesterday, though."

"Why don't you try to eat something," Catherine suggested, standing up. "If you'll just get dressed for me, I'll go make some pancakes, and then we can decide if you're feeling well enough to go to school, okay?"

Lindsey's grin showed the hole where a front tooth had been until three days ago. "Okay." She pushed the covers back and swung her legs around to hop out of bed.

Catherine hesitated at the door, her hand on the frame as she watched her daughter go over to the dresser. She never regretted the passing of time in any other area of her life than with Lindsey. It was both terrifying and amazing to watch her grow day by day. It seemed like just yesterday that she'd had to set out clothes for her to wear, and hold the sleeves out straight to overcome the difficulty of bent elbows and shoulders.

"Mo-mmy," Lindsey interrupted her thoughts, and the CSI blinked to see her daughter standing, hands on hips, in front of the dresser. "I can pick out my own clothes."

"I know you can, sweetie," Catherine said with a bittersweet smile. She closed the door behind her and refused to let herself get caught up in melancholy thoughts of how quickly her life was moving as she set a pan on a burner and reached up to pull down the box of instant pancake mix. Eddie had been the one who'd known how to make fluffy, delicious buttermilk pancakes from scratch. It had been his reconciliation meal of choice.

No, those weren't good thoughts to be dwelling on either. She mixed in the water with an expert hand, dropped butter into the pan, and set the table while she waited for the pan to warm up enough. Lindsey emerged from her bedroom just as the smooth hiss of the butter as it began to melt called her attention back to the stove.

"What kinds of shapes do you want today?"

It was the traditional question, and Lindsey pulled up the traditional stool next to the counter, leaning over on her elbows to watch as Catherine spread the butter around the pan with a spatula. "A butterfly."

Privately, Catherine decided that the stomach bug had very much passed, and the first queasiness at waking up had simply been that, if her daughter was now well enough to be leaning halfway over the stove taking in the scent of the batter as it made contact with the pan. "Butterfly it is. That's going to be hard."

"You can do it," Lindsey said confidently, and Catherine blinked back sudden tears. She'd never had such unrestrained faith placed in her as this beautiful girl did every day. She restrained herself from reaching over and hugging her, saddened by the knowledge that her daughter was starting to outgrow her desire for physical affection.

Bubbles began to rise up through the pancake batter, and with a flip of her wrist, she turned it over. "How's that?"

"Perfect," Lindsey said ecstatically. Next was a heart, and then an L for Lindsey, and then Catherine made a few small medallions for herself. Batter dropped across the pan, creating a track of tiny beige dots, and she froze when she caught herself thinking that they looked like blood drop patterns. Deliberately, she pushed the tiny spots into the larger round pancakes, and they disappeared when she flipped them over.

They ate quickly, as school would be starting in a half an hour, and Catherine set the dishes in the sink to deal with later. "Feeling any better?"

She could almost see the calculation in the usually guileless eyes. It was the time-honored look of guesstimation as to just how gullible a parent was feeling on any given day, and that look alone told her Lindsey was recovered enough. "Yeah, I guess so." She paused. "Would you do my hair?"

The smile that touched her lips was wobbly as she felt the tears again, and decided it must be that time of the month for her to be reacting so strongly. "I'd love that."

The corn silk blonde hair was slippery in her fingers, but soon enough it was tamed to a French braid, and when Catherine pulled up to the school, she leaned over and gave Lindsey a kiss on the cheek despite the girl's squirming embarrassment at being seen like that at school. The car was instantly silent and empty, and all the exhaustion of the long shift caught up to Catherine as she stumbled in the front door and through the rote motions of brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed, falling into sleep the minute her head touched the pillow.

Warrick woke from a dream full of flickering lights and the green felt of a blackjack table under his fingers to the shrill ringing of his phone. Given how often he was woken up by the thing, he'd long ago learned to set it at the highest possible volume. Blearily, he pulled the covers away from his head. The first thing his eyes alighted upon was a well-used pack of cards on his nightstand, placed there the way some people left packs of cigarettes by their beds. The paper tab of the cardboard box was soft and separating slightly, and the edges of the cards were pale brown from repeated thumbings.

The phone rang again, and he threw off the covers entirely, padding across the floor in bare feet and boxers. He may have turned the volume of the ring all the way up, but he refused to keep it next to his bed. "Brown."

"Warrick," the expected voice said. Grissom was on his cell phone; in a car, perhaps, judging by the ambient noise that was filtering through. "I need you at Desert Palms. Bianca Tolmen's next-of-kin just signed a DNR."

Warrick was already putting the mug full of water in the microwave. He'd have to get by on instant coffee this morning. "And..."

"And I need you to be there to ensure chain of custody on the body," Grissom said bluntly, and Warrick winced and nearly dropped the packet of instant coffee he was taking out of the cabinet.

"Okay." He ran a hand through his hair. "Okay, I'll be there as soon as I can. Who's her next-of-kin?"

The was a muffled scratching as the other man covered the mouthpiece of his phone, and Warrick smiled at the muted feminine voice in the background. Wherever Grissom was going, Sara was with him. "Samuel Tolmen, a brother."

He nodded and had almost hung up before he swung the phone back up to his ear. "Griss? What about overtime?"

"The sherriff woke me up to give me this news himself and make sure I had one of my CSIs at the hospital. Whatever is going on here, he's caught up in it, and he wants to get to the bottom of it. He'll approve any extra overtime we want."

"Got it. All right, I'm off."

He hung the phone back up just as the microwave beeped, and stirred in the coffee powder on his way to the bathroom to hop into the shower, gulping the hot liquid to the back of his mouth to avoid burning his tongue. It was a technique he'd perfected by the necessity of getting as much caffeine into his system as quickly as possible. Within twenty minutes he had showered, dressed, and was out the door, slipping on shades against the bright sunshine.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and he'd had four hours of sleep.

Nick juggled his keys, desperately trying to sort out the appropriate slip of metal that would let him unlock his car. He finally gave up and trapped the phone between his shoulder and ear just as the dialing ended and someone picked up on the other end.

"Grissom."

"Grissom, hey, it's me," he said, finally succeeding in getting the car door open, hopping up into the seat. He left the door open, not willing to let the noise of it closing drown out any part of the conversation. "Look, I'm really sorry I missed your call, I went to the gym and forgot my cell and pager..."

"It's okay, Nick. I called Warrick."

That hurt, far more than he wanted to admit. "Oh. So, um...anything else you need me to do?"

"Nothing in particular." The entomologist's voice was breezy, slightly distracted, and Nick heard the dull thud of a car door slamming shut.

"Oh," he repeated.

"If you feel like more overtime, there's always work to be done." Grissom was pointing out the obvious, and they both knew it.

"No, that's...that's okay. I kinda had plans anyway." He swallowed hard against the lie and found himself studying the way the number on the first memory button of his car radio was just beginning to wear off.

"Fine. Goodbye, Nick."

He hung up the phone and slammed the palm of his hand against the steering wheel of the SUV in frustration.

While there was no logical reason for it, somehow the theater seemed more airy during the daytime. Grissom caught himself thinking that perhaps some of the magic was lost, and then chided himself for such foolish thoughts.

The officer had met him at the door and was now leading him back the same corridor he had traveled the night before that led to the actors' dressing rooms, green room, and other assorted rooms that were used during a production. He entered the green room to see Brass sitting across from a young man.

It wasn't practical to bring every member of the cast and stage crew to the police station for an interview, so several officers had set up impromptu interview rooms throughout the honeycomb of incidental rooms.

Grissom nodded to Brass, who looked up at him sourly. "Sherriff call you too?" At the entomologist's nod, he added in a low grumble, "And here I thought I was done with middle-of-the-afternoon wakeup calls when I went back to detective."

Grissom simply shrugged with a wry half-smile, indicating that their current situation wasn't exactly his choice either, and tried not to think of what Sara had looked like sleepy and mussed in his bed. He'd dropped her off at the lab on his way to the theater - she hadn't wanted to stay in the empty bed and had opted to get started on the paper trail work of the case while he went to find out whatever it was they thought he should know at the theater.

Brass sighed heavily, bringing Grissom back to the green room at the theater. "Neil Meadows, prop manager. Mr. Meadows, why don't you tell Mr. Grissom what you just told me?"

Neil nodded. He was thin, almost emaciated, and pale, with an angled face and short, slightly spiked dirty blond hair. He had thumbs hooked in black jeans, a black polo shirt with the theater insignia embroidered in white on the breast, and terrible posture.

"Well, I mean, it's pretty obvious who killed Bianca." He gulped at the end of the sentence, muddy brown eyes darting nervously from officer to CSI.

"Not to us," Grissom reminded him, more sharply than he'd intended. He tried again. "Are you saying you know someone with motive?"

"Oh, more than enough." They waited for him to continue the sentence, but he remained silent.

Brass brought a hand up to rub over his face. "Mr. Meadows. Please. Just tell us."

The prop manager seemed to stop to consider for a few seconds. "Well, really, two people, and, uh, either of them would be good."

"You only told me one name before," Brass interrupted with frustration.

"I just remembered a second one."

"Mr. Meadows." Now Grissom injected the sharp tone into his voice on purpose.

"Okay, okay, right, fine." He held up one finger. "So we've got Richard Ellory. I mean - yeah. Seriously."

"Why do you believe Mr. Ellory had something to do with Ms. Tolmen's death?" Grissom asked, realizing that he was going to have to lead Neil along question by question and still in the back of his mind wondering why he had been called to the theater to discuss this.

"Because she broke it off with him," Neil said in tones that suggested this should be incredibly obvious. "Nobody breaks up with Richard Ellory. No one ever has. That's what he told her, too. I heard it."

Now this was finally getting more useful. "When did you hear this?"

"Like a week ago. It was in hell week, sometime, I dunno, things all blend together when they're that insane."

"Hell week?" Brass asked, thoroughly confused.

"The last week of dress rehearsals before a production," Grissom interjected quickly before Neil could get sidetracked. "Go on," he addressed to the prop manager.

"Well...they were in her dressing room. I was going to see her about her garland. She'd messed it up pretty good when it caught on Josephine's dress when she fainted that afternoon, so I stayed through the afternoon break and fixed it. I was bringing it back, thinking I'd just put it on her dressing table, and I heard Richard inside the room, yelling."

When it became obvious he wasn't going to continue without prompting, Brass said, "And?"

"He was yelling what I told you. That no one broke up with him. Well, I mean, I added the part about no one ever has, because it's what everyone knows."

"Not us."

"He usually dates one or two of the younger girls in the company during a production. This time it was Bianca and Mallory."

"And Mallory?" The second name had caught Grissom's attention. "Mallory Smith?"

"Yeah. Actually, y'know, that's kind of weird, because he had a thing with Mal last production, too. Midsummer Night's Dream." Neil nodded, as if to himself.

"He played Theseus," Grissom remembered. "And Ms. Smith?"

"Oh, Hippolyta."

Grissom's eyes narrowed. "She went from Hippolyta in Midsummer Night's Dream to an understudy for Hero in Much Ado About Nothing? What happened?"

"Oh, Bianca," he said, as if that answered everything. Neil suddenly sat straight up. "You don't think Mal - no, she wouldn't. I mean, yeah, she was bummed, but she's a professional. Plus she used the extra time to audition for the Lincoln."

"Did she get a part?"

"Well, no, but it was an experience." Neil shrugged. "Look, I'm telling you, it was Ellory. Mal has never even said anything to Bianca about it."

Brass was still scrawling notes to himself, and when Grissom looked over, their eyes met in complete understanding - after Richard Ellory, Mallory Smith would be their next interview.

"You said two people," Grissom remembered.

"Well, sort of. I mean, it's a long shot."

Brass shifted in a way that gave Grissom the impression he was trying not to strangle the prop manager. "Who?"

"Carter James." Neil shrugged. "Her fiancé. But he's not the murder type, if you know what I mean."

Grissom considered asking Neil to strike the phrase "I mean" from his vocabulary, and also to ask him what he thought the "murder type" was, but was afraid any more questions would invite even more equivocation. "I see. Thank you for your help, Mr. Meadows."

"Glad to." He stood and brushed his hands down his jeans to loosen them out again.

"Wait." Grissom reached behind him for his evidence kit without taking his eyes off the prop manager. When Neil had passed his hand across his thigh, he had disturbed what Grissom had previously assumed to be simply wear and tear on the jeans - but now, the pattern changed, it looked strikingly like the residue he'd tape lifted from Bianca's dressing room, the beige powder that Sara had told him was sawdust. "Do you mind if I take a sample of that?"

Neil looked down at his pants to where the entomologist was staring. "Uhhh...sure. It's just sawdust, though."

"Is it?" Grissom asked casually, as he leaned forward and pressed the tape to the jean fabric. "From what?"

"Set dressing. I was helping Leo - he's the set design guy - measure and cut a new leg for the wedding platform. The old one had a crack running through it. He was worried about strain. Why?"

"No particular reason. Do you help Leo out often?"

"I guess. Whenever he needs it. If you're done, I have to run through a few more checklists before the matinée."

"That will be all." Grissom offered him a pleased smile that had nothing to do with the man himself and everything to do with the sawdust currently stuck to the tape he held in his hand.  



	10. Sign and Semblance Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Las Vegas Repertory Shakespeare Company is pleased to announce its 2003 - 2004 season...

Sara leaned back in the rolling chair and propped her feet up on the seat next to her, one hand on the mouse and one stirring sugar into coffee.

The Las Vegas Repertory Shakespeare Company is pleased to announce its 2003 - 2004 season...

Too general. She backed out of that article and then thought better of it, clicking forward again and printing it out to put in the casefile as a general reference article. Even if Grissom probably knew all there was to know about the company, none of the other CSIs had his in-depth knowledge of it.

Her eyes caught the title "Casting of Much Ado About Nothing reveals bright young star" from the Las Vegas Herald Sun, dated just a week ago - opening night. Skimming the article, she read phrases like "astonishingly emotive," "charmingly innocent" among other things. In fact, the review barely mentioned the other actors. It was focused on Bianca, and her breakout performance. The picture included had been taken of a scene Sara hadn't seen; Bianca as Hero, in a white wedding dress, was clasping the hands of Scott Loring as Claudio, while the friar gazed indulgently from the background. Bianca's dark looks and Scott's chiseled pale ones were a striking contrast. They made for a beautiful couple.

Sara knew better than to think she could read anything into the picture other than the emotions of that particular moment in the play, but she found herself wondering if Bianca and Scott had been sleeping together.

They certainly had no lack of motive. Someone as successful as Bianca, right out of college - she was barely twenty-three - and with a fiancé who would call so obsessively suggested any number of traditional scenarios for revenge-based homicide.

Another hour of research, and Sara had found and printed several articles from the UNLV campus newspaper describing Bianca's career there; she was Phaedra, Antigone, Juliet. Apparently she had a penchant for the classical roles, though there were a few scattered reviews of musicals in which she had, once again, held a lead role. She'd graduated in 2003 with a theater major - natch - and a minor in classical studies. Now that she thought about it, Sara could remember seeing a few books in Latin and Greek on the shelves in the living room. That had been Warrick's search area, though, and she trusted his abilities as a CSI to have remarked upon anything salient about the books.

Satisfied that she at least had enough for a rough character sketch, Sara frowned down at her cold coffee. She'd gotten so caught up in the search that she hadn't taken more than a sip or two. With a grimace, she tossed back a gulp and shut down the computer.

Background check done, she wandered down to the evidence lockers. During the day, the crime labs were bustling with people, easily two to three times as many as were there on the average night. But it still felt empty. It was a fanciful thought, that the labs would feel empty without Grissom and the other members of the night shift team, but Sara found herself thinking it anyway.

Taking a seat in the caged-in room, she began once again to sort through the contents of Bianca's dressing room table. Once again, she found nothing especially probative. Idly, she flipped through the volume of Shakespeare's comedies, wondering if she'd marked anything in her copy of Much Ado About Nothing. The binding cracked open, but to the pages for A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A small card fell out - the type of sentiment card that would accompany flowers. It looked very similar to the waterlogged card they'd found in Bianca's trash, actually, only that one had been edged in faint roses; this one had a blue and gold ribbon scrolling around the outside and a woman in a Renaissance dress looking over her shoulder with a slight smile in the upper left hand corner. The drawing was tiny - Sara could have covered it with her thumb - but it was incredibly detailed, and charming.

To the naked eye, the cards were of the same type of paper, and the same size. The same florist, perhaps? The handwriting was certainly different, and this card didn't have a Biblical quotation on it. "To my Hippolyta," it read, "How shall we beguile the lazy time, if not with some delight?"

Hippolyta had been Bianca's role before Hero. Was her fiancé a Shakespeare enthusiast as well? Or had this been sent by someone else entirely?

She bagged the card to send to Ronnie, resolving to deliver it personally as soon as shift started and to wait in the QD lab until the tech had finished not only this new card but the card from the trash as well. Depending on how long the card had been in the book, they would need to dust it for prints. The way this case was going so far, they'd probably have a new suspect once they pulled the prints.

Once more, the contents of Bianca's purse proved unenlightening, but Sara took the time to note down all her credit card numbers for tracing. If Ronnie was still balking on the QD evidence, she could apply herself to the paper trail more later tonight. She also noted the name and address of the coffee shop; the frequent buyer card seemed to be earning its mileage. There was a purchase almost every day, and occasionally two purchases in one day. If she was that frequent a visitor, perhaps the staff at the shop would know someone with motive.

No cell phone or pager, and there hadn't been a computer in the apartment. In fact, the stereo there had been only one or two steps away from the dumpster. Was she on a strict budget - entirely understandable with probable student loans and the less than spectacular pay of a new company member - or simply not very interested in electronics? More research would be able to lead them in the correct direction.

She set the purse aside and once again opened the jewelry box, twirling the masks of comedy and tragedy around on their chain. No inscription, no jeweler's mark, nothing to help them discover more about their significance in Bianca's life. Sara made a mental note to ask Grissom about the archetypes of comedy and tragedy, certain he would be able to give her a more than complete historiographical overview of the subject. The best she could do was her knowledge that they were symbols of theater.

The engagement ring was exactly as it had looked in the dressing room: a solitary diamond, set on a gold band. Classic and simple. Since they knew who her fiancé was and would be speaking to him soon, there was no sense in trying to track the ring itself. The task would have been tedious at best with a ring as common as this one. Any jewelry shop in Vegas would sell a ring exactly like it.

Sara replaced the ring and set the entire box of evidence to the side, drumming her fingers restlessly. If she kept pushing this case, especially in the absence of all the expected evidence from today's interviews and other activities, she would go stale on it. The decision was made in a split second - she would grab some coffee and then work her other cases until night shift began and she could once again move forward with the evidence processing. She had the overtime authorized, and she saw no reason not to take full advantage of it.

"Excuse me, miss, but I'm looking for Bianca Tolmen's room," Warrick asked the nurse at the desk in the Intensive Care Unit.

"Are you family?" was her pointed response.

He dug out his badge, restraining himself from muttering under his breath. If the sheriff had been so concerned about getting to the hospital, he could have at least had the courage to pave the way with a few words about how a CSI was expected at the hospital. "I'm with the Crime Lab."

"Oh." The nurse's expression changed only marginally. "Room 242."

"Thank you," Warrick said, snapping his badge shut. "Down here?"

"End of the hall, take a right." The phone rang, and she jerked her chin in the direction he had pointed and then reached for the receiver. "Excuse me."

He waved his hand slightly, indicating it was fine, and headed down the hallway, his sneakers squeaking on the sterile tiles. At the end of the hall was room 240, and when he rounded to the right, 242 was the first room on the right.

The door was ever so slightly ajar, and he fisted his hand briefly before knocking, bowing his head. No matter how many times he made hospital visits for a case, they never got any easier.

The room was silent except for the whirrs and hums and clicks of the life support equipment. Even under the medical tape and the tubing, Warrick recognized Bianca's face instantly, her dusky skin pale and dark hair spread out against the white pillow. Her chest was rising and falling rhythmically - too rhythmically. Human beings did not normally breathe in a perfect twenty times a minute, nor were their breaths accompanied by the hiss of a ventilator.

As he got closer, he noticed the body slumped over on the opposite side of Bianca's. Warrick cleared his throat discreetly, and the young man jumped up, startled.

His resemblance to Bianca was eerie, with the same wide dark eyes, accentuated cheekbones, and dusky skin. Under normal circumstances, he would have been good-looking, but it was obvious he hadn't been in normal circumstances for some time now. His eyes were bloodshot, hair unkempt, and tracked along the right side of his face was an angry red mark - he'd fallen asleep on a fold in the sheet and blood was only just now returning to the area.

"Mr. Tolmen?" Warrick asked, walking forward a few steps. "I'm Warrick Brown, with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. I was asked to be here..." He couldn't finish the sentence. Grissom would have been able to, but faced with the grief in front of him, Warrick left the words unsaid.

"Oh. Yeah, they said you would be coming by." He ran his hand through dark hair and tufts of it stood up spikily. "Sam, by the way. No one called me Samuel but my grandmother."

"Well, I'm definitely not your grandmother," Warrick said, trying to lighten the mood as he came forward to take a seat on the other side of the bed.

"No. No, you're not." Sam offered him a wan smile before his expression darkened yet. "Did you get him yet?"

"We're still investigating all possible angles," the CSI answered cautiously.

"What do you need to investigate?" Sam's hand fisted convulsively in the white sheet, and he looked down, as if surprised at his own violence, and smoothed the sheet out carefully. "He did this."

"You're going to have to explain who 'he' is," Warrick asked.

"Carter. Carter James. The bastard. I always knew he had a screw or two loose, but this..." His waved hand took in Bianca's body.

"You mean her fiancé?" Warrick asked. "What would make you suspect him?"

"He used to be okay. We were close in college, but when his mother died, he...got religion. And not in a good way. Bianca and I, we've always been religious, but Carter...he started to really go overboard. We graduated pretty soon afterward, and I got the job in Reno. I didn't hear anything more about it until Bianca called me a few days ago, she said he was really losing his mind, that he didn't want her to act anymore because it was a sin, and on and on. I was going to come out this weekend anyway, but..." His voice broke and he buried his face in his hands, silent sobs shaking him.

Warrick stared down at his clasped hands, thoughts churning. If Carter had reacted that badly to Bianca's choice of profession, what would he have done if he had found out about her affairs? And if it was his voice on the answering machine, then they had evidence that he had been in an agitated state of mind the night Bianca had died. Yet another suspect for the list.

"And I'm still waiting for him," Sam whispered with something like wonder.

"Excuse me?" Warrick asked, looking up in confusion.

"Carter. He didn't deserve her, but she loved him. She would've...she would've wanted him here. So I called him and told him that he had until five."

As discreetly as possible, Warrick checked his watch. Quarter to. "He wasn't home?"

"No. I left a message." Sam slid his fingers through Bianca's. "Fifteen minutes, now. He's not coming."

Warrick had no idea what to say, so he stayed silent for another five minutes before standing. "I'll be just outside." He hesitated. "We may need you later to...sign some forms and give some testimony. Here's my card." He passed the small business card over, and realized that someone would have to tell him that Bianca's apartment was now a crime scene, so he wouldn't be able to stay there that night. He decided that would have to wait for later; for now, he could leave Sam with his sister.

As he was exiting, the doctor entered the room, and Warrick bowed his head briefly, rubbing a hand over his face. It would be peaceful, at least. The seizures had cut the oxygen off to Bianca's brain long enough to disable all but the most basic functions - heartbeat and shallow breathing. Without the support of the ventilator, and the constant attention of the EKG, she would simply slide from her coma into death in a matter of minutes.

And their case would go from attempted murder to murder.  



	11. Sign and Semblance Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "No." She checked the cookies in the oven, tongue stuck between her teeth and portable phone pinched between cheek and shoulder. "I mean it, Gil. I have to be assistant leader for the Brownie meeting tonight." They weren't burned, not really. She was fairly sure that if ten years ago someone had told her that one day she would be stressing over chocolate chip cookies and Girl Scout meetings, she would have laughed herself sick. It was still a fairly laughable situation. "You've known about this for three weeks now."

"Catherine..."

"No." She checked the cookies in the oven, tongue stuck between her teeth and portable phone pinched between cheek and shoulder. "I mean it, Gil. I have to be assistant leader for the Brownie meeting tonight." They weren't burned, not really. She was fairly sure that if ten years ago someone had told her that one day she would be stressing over chocolate chip cookies and Girl Scout meetings, she would have laughed herself sick. It was still a fairly laughable situation. "You've known about this for three weeks now."

"I need you. You're the people person."

If she had a dime for every time he threw that back in her face... "Call Nick. He's a people person too."

"He has plans."

"So. Do. I." Now she was leaning rather heavily on her tolerated insubordination.

"Fine. I'll call him."

Judging by the peevish tone in his voice she would pay for her refusal later. With that in mind, she decided to push it a little further. "You need to trust him more."

"I trust him." The way he snapped that out, far too quickly, told her she'd hit a nerve. "I wouldn't have hired him otherwise."

"You and I both know that's not the same thing." She dug the spatula into the nearly black edge of the cookie, trying to separate it from the non-stick pan, wondering how on earth it could still be that soggy in the middle. "Call him."

There was a huff of frustration on the other end, and she rolled her eyes, safe in the knowledge that he was half a city away.

"I'll be in right after the meeting," she pointed out in a half-hearted attempt to mollify him. "But I've been skimping on assistant leader duties all year. I have to go tonight."

"I'll see you later, then."

His goodbye caught her in the middle of pulling the second tray from the oven, and she had to listen to dial tone for a few seconds while she slid the tray onto the top of the stove and resolved to buy a new oven mitt as soon as possible. The one she was currently using had a large blackened area in the palm and no longer insulated against heat very well - Lindsey had left it on a burner once while making carefully supervised scrambled eggs. Apparently not supervised enough - the smoke had set off the fire alarm, and Catherine had had to throw the oven mitt into the sink and douse it with water. And then there had been another five minutes of shrieking noise while she tried to find the stool to turn off the alarm.

That had been two years ago, and she still hadn't replaced the oven mitt. It was yet another sign that she needed to live more and work less - yet another sign she was sure she would end up ignoring.

Nick slid the SUV into the parking space easily, long practice allowing him easy maneuverability with the bulky car. The sun was beginning to descend in the sky, throwing long shadows, but he still slid his sunglasses on out of habit. It was a reflex that probably came from too many years of working the night shift; anything other than pitch black felt oddly bright.

He took them off once he entered the theater, and flashed his badge at the staff entrance. A quick query to one of the other uniformed officers told him that Grissom and Brass were conducting their interviews in the green room. He rememberd the way from the night before and shouldered his way into the room, evidence kit in hand.

"Nick," Brass acknowledged him with a nod.

"I need you to interview Mallory Smith and Scott Loring," Grissom said without looking up from his opened binder, where he was obviously overviewing notes. "Ms. Smith is waiting just next door, in the cast dressing room, and Scott Loring will be arriving within the hour."

"Okay," he said, nodding his understanding.

"Detective Conroy will be working with you," Brass said with a knowing grin.

Nick tried not to wince. He'd appreciated being called in to help, especially after he'd told Grissom he had plans and rather effectively nixed his chance for overtime. But he and Erin Conroy did not get along, something he'd never been able to understand. Sara would have told him that was his male ego run amok, and he would have agreed with her if he thought he'd done the slightest thing to offend the female detective, but in this case, he had absolutely no idea what transgression he'd committed. As far as he could tell, she had taken an instant and total dislike to him, and they hadn't been able to progress past that in the two years she'd been a homicide detective in Vegas.

"Backround," Grissom said, backing up a few pages in his notes and finally glancing up at Nick. "We have a statement from the prop manager, Neil Meadows, that Mallory Smith was in a relationship with Richard Ellory at the same time as Bianca Tolmen. This relationship had lasted longer than was apparently normal for Mr. Ellory. Ms. Smith seemed to enjoy a relatively elevated status within the company until Ms. Tolmen arrived, at which point she became her understudy."

"I'd say that's motive," Nick observed, raising an eyebrow. "And Scott Loring?"

"You know as much as we do," Grissom said with a shrug. "He had dinner with Ms. Tolmen the night she died."

"But he couldn't have poisoned her," Nick pointed out. "Strychnine acts fast."

"He could still have poisoned her. He just didn't do it at dinner. Anyway, judging by the number of messages the fiancé left, I'd say he was the jealous type. Find out if he had any reason to be jealous of Scott Loring."

"Point taken. Okay - next door?" His query was met with a nod. "Right."

Erin Conroy was indeed sitting next door, in a delicate metal chair that looked like it was far more suited to its original purpose of dressing table chair than as a prop in a police interrogation. Across from her was a petite young woman with light brown hair swept back in a pony tail. She had a gymnast's spare, whipcord build and wore no makeup, seemingly preferring instead to rely upon a clear complexion and wide blue-green eyes. It was a look that worked for her, Nick noted with no small amount of masculine observation.

"Detective Conroy," he addressed, careful to start off the exchange as much on the defensive as he could be. They needed to work as a team if they were going to get through this like professionals.

"CSI Stokes," she responded coolly.

Well, so much for that.

He held out his hand to Mallory Smith, and felt only bone when he took it, a rather unnerving sensation. "I'm Nick Stokes, I'm with the Crime Lab." He sat down when she released his hand, irrationally nervous that he would break the small chair.

"Mallory Smith," she said, smiling nervously. "I'm not really sure why I'm here. I barely even saw what happened - I was pretty far in the back of the wedding crowd."

"Hmmm," Erin said. "Well, actually, our questions don't really have anything to do your observations on that night's performance."

"Okay..." the actress said with a frown. "What, then? Bianca and I weren't all that close."

Erin nodded, and flipped back a few pages in her notes. "How long have you been with the company?"

"About six years now. I moved to Las Vegas from San Diego - I was at the university there. Dance major...I wanted to be a showgirl."

"And you ended up performing Shakespeare?" Nick asked, intensely curious. Usually it happened the other way around.

"It's still the stage," Mallory answered, as if that were an explanation in itself.

"And how long have you known Richard Ellory?" Erin picked up the questioning.

Instantly, Mallory's entire body language changed. She leaned back and crossed her arms, eyes narrowing slightly. "What does that have to do with anything?"

Nick tried his best charming smile. "Humor us."

"Since I got here, pretty much. More like I knew of him. We didn't actually become friends until earlier this season. I landed the part of Hippolyta in Midsummer Night's Dream." Her voice was proud, challenging.

"Friends?" Erin asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

"I'm sorry, I really don't see what bearing my private life has on this investigation. What happened to Bianca was horrible. I had nothing to do with it. End of story."

"You didn't answer the question," Nick pointed out.

"You didn't really ask one," Mallory rebutted.

"Let me rephrase," Erin tried with the sickly sweet smile Nick knew so well, and was intensely grateful that it wasn't turned on him this time. "We have testimony from other members of the theater company suggesting that your relationship with Mr. Ellory went well beyond friendship. Do you wish to confirm or deny those statements?"

If Mallory's eyes narrowed anymore, she would look like a cat. "Richard and I became lovers midway through the production."

"Thank you," Nick said, with a gracious smile.

Erin didn't choose the gracious route. "So, you were here for six years, and then just this fall you finally got a lead role, the lead actor - things were looking pretty good. It must have been incredibly frustrating when Ms. Tolmen arrived and took all of that away from you."

Fingers drumming restlessly against the long shelf of the room-length dressing table behind her, Mallory was now officially pissed off. "Bianca was an incredibly gifted actress. She won the role. That's the nature of theater. And I don't know who you're getting these 'statements' from, but Richard and I are still together."

"Still, he was also pursuing a relationship with Ms. Tolmen during this production. You're trying to tell me that didn't bother you at all?"

"It bothered me," Mallory admitted. "But it was over before she died. If you think I killed her in a jealous rage, then your logic is more than slightly flawed. And if you're looking for professional jealousy, why don't you look in Josephine's direction? It was no secret that Hero was just a stepping stone for Bianca. She wanted it all - and she could have had it, too, even over Josephine. The lead actress reduced to playing the ingenue to a girl just out of college? In the grand scheme of things, she had a lot more to lose than I did. And they hated each other. Again, no secret."

"If we want to talk to Ms. Calvert about her problems with Ms. Tolmen, then we'll ask her," Erin reminded the other woman. "Right now, we're talking about you."

"And I told you. I had nothing to do with it. I only saw Bianca on stage that night. She mostly kept to herself."

Nick tapped Erin on the shoulder and leaned in slightly. "We have no evidence tying her to any of the crime scenes. If we find anything, we can come back, but for now, all we're getting is her more pissed off."

For a moment, he thought she was going to disagree with him out of sheer spite, but she nodded quickly. "You can go, Ms. Smith. We'll be in touch later if we have any more questions."

Mallory didn't bother to say goodbye, and the only reason the door didn't slam was because it was set on a spring specifically so that it wouldn't slam while there was a production going on.

As soon as the door had closed fully, Nick shook his head. "I don't like her for it."

"She was evasive and occasionally outright devious," Erin countered angrily.

"You pushed her buttons."

"She fingered Calvert too fast."

"She had a point."

Detective and CSI glared at each other, and finally Nick held up his hands in mock surrender.

"Hey, look. It could go either way. But we don't have enough evidence to know yet. Truce?"

Erin looked at him suspiciously out of the corner of her eye for a few seconds, and then shrugged. "Yeah. Sure. I'll go get Loring."

"Richard Ellory," Brass read. "Fifty-two years old. Originally from Seattle. He did a couple of movies when he was in his twenties, came to Vegas when he was thirty-two and has been with the company since then. He's been getting leads for about the last ten years. And, I should tell you some information that's not on this handy little summary the background boys came up with. He and Mobley were frat brothers together. Pledged the same year."

"That explains why I've already gotten two calls from our good sherriff about this case," Grissom mused, leaning back in his chair, fist under his chin as he thought. "The question is, is he protecting him in the hope of innocence or the knowledge of guilt?"

"Mobley may be more of a politician than a policeman, but he wouldn't knowingly protect a criminal," Brass rebutted, quick to defend the honor of even a former cop.

"We'll see," Grissom evaded just as the door opened and Richard was escorted into the room by a uniformed officer.

"Detective Jim Brass, Las Vegas PD, and this is CSI Gil Grissom, Las Vegas Crime Lab," Brass introduced them. "Why don't you have a seat, Mr. Ellory."

Richard Ellory had aged spectacularly, and Grissom was surprised to feel the smallest amount of male envy in himself. Without prior knowledge of his actual age, an educated guess would have placed the actor in his mid to late thirties. He had jet-black hair only going slightly steel-grey at the temples, dark blue eyes, and a bone structure that made his features ageless. He sat with grace and somehow managed to look as if he were completely commanding a room in which he was decidedly at the disadvantage.

"Detective Brass, Mr. Grissom," he acknowledged them both in turn. "I assume that you think I have something of aid to offer in the investigation."

Brass raised an eyebrow at the excessively formal beginning. "I'd say that's safe to assume."

Richard nodded slowly, his face expressionless. "I see. Then I shall have to start by saying, in the most clichéd manner possible, that I had nothing to do with what happened to Bianca."

Thrust, parry. Grissom watched, fascinated. He had seen Richard Ellory perform onstage a dozen times, and had always admired his affected elegance. It seemed it was a characteristic he carried over into his life, as well. Was it an act, a bleeding of his stage persona into his personality, or had he always possessed that air?

"I wouldn't have expected you to say anything else. We just have a few more questions," Brass said, bulldogging ahead in his intimable manner. "What can you tell us about your relationship with Ms. Tolmen?"

"We were, briefly, lovers," Richard answered easily. "For a period of perhaps three weeks. Previous to that, we were good friends, and post-separation we remained good friends."

Grissom and Brass exchanged a surprised glance. They hadn't expected him to admit to the relationship quite so quickly.

"How was the separation itself?" Grissom prodded.

"As amicable as such things can be," the actor replied with a shrug.

"That's funny," Brass continued. "We hear it was pretty messy."

Richard ducked his head to hide a small smile. "I see you've been listening to gossip. In the interests of complete honesty: yes, I did initially react rather badly. In the heat of the moment, I said several things that were less than considerate. As I imagine any human being would."

"Uh huh," Brass grunted.

"With a small amount of distance, I realized that she had made the correct decision for logical reasons. I am not a vengeful man, Detective Brass. Return to those who told you of my earlier rash words and ask them what my interactions with Bianca after that day were like. I assure you, they were as warm as they had been previously." He leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs, twining his fingers and catching his knee in them.

He was cold - almost too cold. Apart from the small smile, his expression hadn't wavered in the slightest, and Grissom found himself comparing Richard's composure to Josephine Calvert's. They were well-suited to act across from each other, both with their elegance and perfect manners and blunt honesty. He'd been a criminalist for too long to take that at face value.

"And your relationship with Mallory Smith?" Brass pushed.

Richard nodded slightly, as if he had expected that question next. "Mallory and I have been seeing each other for approximately five months now."

"Five months? Really? What was going on with you and Ms. Tolmen, then?"

He seemed to ponder for a few seconds before replying. "Mutual human weakness. I'm afraid I can't give you any better explanation than that."

"And Mallory was just okay with that?"

"She never expressed an opinion one way or the other that I recall."

"Because you never told her or because you never asked her what she thought?"

"Both. Either." Another careless shrug. "To fall back on another cliché, Mallory is not a murderer."

"But that's just your opinion." Brass was clearly becoming increasingly frustrated. Richard was being just open enough that no one could accuse him of hiding anything, but evasive enough to lead them to suspect that he was hiding something.

"Do you have any hobbies, Mr. Ellory?" Grissom interrupted, trying another tack.

That got a reaction - mild surprise flickering in his dark blue eyes as he refocused his attention from detective to CSI. "I do. What makes you ask?"

Grissom tried his best guileless shrug. "Just curious, I guess. What kinds of things do you do?"

"I read. I golf and swim." Richard's expression was now openly quizzical. "Any number of other small things."

"How about wood carving?"

"Yes. In a manner of speaking. I've been hand-carving a small sailboat for several years now. Call it an exercise in progressive futility. Boat-building in the middle of the desert is not the most practical of endeavors."

Grissom had to smile. "No, I suppose it isn't. Thank you, Mr. Ellory, we have no further questions."

The actor was clearly still wondering where the question about wood carving had come from, but he surmounted that quickly and stood, shaking each man's hand in turn. "If I can be of any assistance in the future, please do not hesitate to contact me. I want as much as you do to apprehend whoever did this to Bianca."

"Oh, we will," Brass said sourly, and glared at Richard's back as he left the green room. "Wood carving, huh?" he asked as soon as the door had closed and they were once again alone.

"Another possible source of the sawdust we found in the dressing room and the bed sheets."

"I'd say we have our lead suspect," Brass said with a satisfied smirk.  



	12. Sign and Semblance Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sara frowned slightly at the dual ends of trashbags underneath the microscope, shifting the right-hand one slightly and then smirking. "Positive association," she muttered. "Gotcha." It was a few seconds before she seemed to register the lab tech's presence, and then she looked up in surprise. "It isn't start of shift yet, is it?"

"I am, in fact, a god," Greg announced as he walked into the lab.

Sara frowned slightly at the dual ends of trashbags underneath the microscope, shifting the right-hand one slightly and then smirking. "Positive association," she muttered. "Gotcha." It was a few seconds before she seemed to register the lab tech's presence, and then she looked up in surprise. "It isn't start of shift yet, is it?"

"No, it's still only eight. I heard a rumor we were authorized for extra overtime on this case." He was practically dancing from foot to foot in excitement with his news.

"You heard right. What have you got?" She swiveled on the stool to face him.

"Pick a sheet, any sheet," he said, fanning out several printouts.

"Greg," she said warningly, and he rolled his eyes at her.

"Spoil my fun. Okay. These two are the in-depth analyses on the sawdust residue. It's not the same type of wood."

"What?" Sara took the sheets from him and read them with a frown. "Glue residue?"

"Reclaimed," Greg clarified. "It's basically the odds and ends recycled and mixed in with glue. It's cheap but sturdy enough to hold up to some wear and tear. You can use it for all sorts of things, but," and he held up a finger and grinned charmingly, "I made some calls. The biggest lumberyard in town says they sell a ton of the stuff, and guess who their main customer is?"

"Las Vegas Reperetory Theater?" Sara hazarded.

"Bingo."

"Greg, this is the sample from the theater. All it proves is that someone who was around while the set was being built was in Bianca's dressing room the day she was poisoned."

"Oh." He seemed to deflate.

"It's still good work, though. We can use it to narrow the field of suspects." She smiled encouragingly at him and flipped to the next sheet. "?."

"Yeah," Greg said, picking up again. "That's a little bit more specific. You probably have to order it. The analysis hadn't finished by the time I called the lumberyard, so I couldn't check with them." He shrugged in apology. "But once you find someone using this particular type of wood, you've got them nailed. Um, no pun intended. He flashed a not-so-sheepish grin. "Also," he continued, holding out four more pieces of paper. "DNA analysis of the bedsheets."

She scanned the information. "One vaginal donor, that's expected. As soon as we get a sample to match we'll be able to eliminate it. And three different sperm donors - we only know of two lovers." She reshuffled the papers and smiled up at him. "You've been busy."

He shrugged and tried to be humble for a full three seconds. "Yeah, well, important case. The sherriff called?"

"Yeah. Woke us up. Grissom's down at the theater doing interviews." She caught his wince at the word "us" out of the corner of her eye and hid her smile. "No idea why, though." A line on the semen analysis printouts caught her eye. "The newest stain had only occured once?"

Greg nodded. "It's only two, maybe three days old."

"That probably eliminates the fiancé," Sara observed. "So she found a new lover?"

"Looks like." Greg edged toward the doorway. "I'm going to run the confirmation on the folic acid pills you found, and then try to match the bloodstains on the blanket Nick found to the vaginal DNA. He said she probably hit her head while she was seizing."

"It happens." Sara looked up from the papers briefly. "Thanks, Greg. This is a big help."

He grinned openly. "For you? Anytime."

"Scott Loring," Erin read from her notes. "Twenty-seven, lives with his sister. He joined the company nine years ago. No college education, Las Vegas native. Not even a parking ticket on his record."

"There's always a first," Nick said, and hated himself for thinking that, let alone saying it out loud.

"Yeah," the detective replied sourly as Scott was shown in.

Scott Loring had a slim, boyish figure, with fine features and thick lashes around light brown eyes. His chesnut hair was slightly wavy and kept on the long side, brushing the tips of his ears. He projected an air of naïveté and innocence that Nick knew from experience was hard to counterfeit - but there was a first time for everything.

"Hey," he said, smiling nervously as he sat down carefully on the spindly metal chair. He looked around with wide eyes and the slightest hint of a blush tinged his cheeks - as if he were seeing the women's dressing room for the first time. "They said you wanted to talk to me?"

"Just a few quick questions," Nick reassured him, leaning his forearms forward onto his knees. "I'm Nick Stokes, with the crime lab, and this is Detective Erin Conroy, with the police department."

The young actor nodded at them each in turn. "Sure. Okay. Ask away."

"What was your relationship with Bianca Tolmen?" Erin began.

"We were friends. Pretty close, I guess. She was new to the company, and I've been here for a while, so when she got here I showed her the ropes. Not that she needed much showing." He grinned in remembrance. "She landed Hippolyta right out of the gate, and she was the best Hero I've ever seen."

"Just friends?" Erin prodded.

The blush that had been threatening earlier crept up and turned Scott's cheeks a full blazing red. "Yes! She was engaged!"

Nick held out a comforting hand. "Hey, we have to ask, y'know?"

"Yeah. I guess. I just don't get why everyone has to assume that we were...that there was something going on, just because we were friends." He frowned, and Nick felt like he had kicked a puppy. Scott was twenty-seven years old and apparently he really was still that innocent.

"You went out to dinner with Ms. Tolmen the night she was poisoned," Erin continued, all business.

"Yeah. She'd mentioned something about it, the night before, so I gave her a call that afternoon and told her I was still interested. In dinner. It wasn't, um, anything more than that." He stopped, and took a breath. "She wasn't home, so I tried again later and finally called her cell phone and talked to her then."

"Why didn't you call her cell phone right away?" It probably wasn't at all germane to the investigation, but Nick felt he should ask anyway.

"I don't like calling people on their cell phones. I always feel like I'm interrupting them. It's stupid, I know, but..." Scott spread his hands. "I always try their home phone first."

"Hey, I understand," Nick said soothingly. "So what time did you go to dinner?"

"Four-thirty or so. We had to eat early; curtain call was at six. We got here at quarter to six, and after that we didn't see each other until our first scene. And before you ask, I was offstage when she fainted." He chewed his lip and looked away from them. "I was with her when...when she started going into seizures, though. I sat with her until the ambulance came to take her away. It was horrible."

"Can you think of anyone who may have wanted to harm Ms. Tolmen?" Erin jumped in.

"No. No one." Scott shook his head vehemently. "I don't understand why anyone would want to do that."

Erin sat back in her chair, arms crossed. "Okay. You can go."

"If there's anything else I can do to help, please let me know," the young actor said earnestly, holding out his hand to shake both of theirs. "Really."

"We'll keep you in mind," Nick reassured him. "Thanks."

The instant Scott had left and the door closed behind him, Nick turned to forestall what he knew would come out of Erin's mouth. "No way. Absolutely no way."

"He's an actor," Erin pointed out, and that had Nick fumbling for a few seconds.

"No. Some things you can't fake. That kid doesn't even have a clue as to why someone would commit murder."

"He's been performing Shakespeare for the past nine years," Erin snapped. "If he didn't understand what was going on in those plays, he wouldn't be as successful an actor as he is now."

"How many suspects do you want in this case?"

"Do you want any?"

They both stopped, aware that they were playing an only slightly more mature and professional game of "I know you are, but what am I?"

Nick was the first to break the uneasy silence. "We can't suspect him just because he's an actor. Most of the people that have been interviewed fit that description. He doesn't have a motive."

"True," Erin admitted.

He looked down at his watch. "Nine o'clock. Anyone left to interview?"

She checked her notes and then shook her head. "No. That's it. I'm going to go spend the rest of my night writing this up into reports."

"I'm going to grab something to eat." Nick hesitated, and then added, at his peril, "Want to come with?"

For a split second, he could have sworn she was considering it. But she shook her head. "Can't. Paperwork."

"See you around, then."  



	13. Sign and Semblance Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was three hours longer than they had expected her to live after disconnecting the tubes and wires, but her body had seemed to rally one last time against its own decimation. She had never regained consciousness.

Bianca Tolmen's weakened heart and respiratory system gave out three hours and twenty-three minutes after she was removed from life support. Her passing was quiet; they had unhooked the various monitors and alarms. It was an expected death, and there was no need to alarm the ICU ward unecessarily.

It was three hours longer than they had expected her to live after disconnecting the tubes and wires, but her body had seemed to rally one last time against its own decimation. She had never regained consciousness.

Warrick was left to imagine her final hours; he had taken refuge in a glass-walled waiting room a down the hall, leaving Sam alone with his sister and his grief. Ten minutes into the death watch - it would be avoidance to call it anything else - he had called Grissom to relay the news about Carter James. The call had rung straight through to voicemail, a sure sign that wherever he was, Grissom had turned his cell phone off. He called Sara instead.

"Yeah, I don't really know where he is," she told him when he asked. "He was at the theater doing interviews with Brass, but he should be on his way back to the lab by now."

"I don't really need to talk to him. Just letting someone know that Carter James should be considered a suspect and that I've got a witness who would be able to provide a tentative ID on the voice on the answering machine tape."

"Got it. Hey, listen, Greg got back to me on that residue - sawdust."

"Huh."

"Yeah, I know, random. It's looking like that kind of case. Anyway, I'll let Grissom know about James." She paused and there was a moment's awkward silence. "How long do you think you'll be?"

He coughed and shuffled his feet against the tiled floor. "No idea. I'll give David a call when...I hear anything."

"Yeah." He could picture her shivering, gathering herself in in much the same way he wanted to do and would have done had he been alone in the labs. "Okay, catch you later, then."

Half an hour into the watch, he found himself thinking he should have brought a book. An hour and a half into the watch, he'd read all the neutral magazines in the room and was eyeing an issue of Cosmo and wondering what exactly nine tips to achieve better orgasm consisted of. An hour and forty-five minutes in, and a mother and two small children joined him in the room. He excused silently and went to the bathroom, wandering the halls for a half an hour, and when he returned, the family was gone. Whether they had received good or bad news would remain a mystery.

Two and a half hours in, he broke down and not only learned tips to a better orgasm but also took a quiz that identified him as an aggressive lover. After that, it was all downhill, and three hours in found him reading about Janet and Fred's failing marriage and how they could repair the damage while trying to keep the cover of Good Housekeeping as discreet as possible.

It would have been laughable if not for the circumstances.

Sam came in to tell him the news in person, strangely tranquil as he entered the room and sat in the ratty chair across from where Warrick was sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor.

"It's over," Sam said quietly, mirroring Warrick's posture. "She's not suffering anymore."

The CSI nodded. "I need to make a call." The other man paid no attention and Warrick stepped outside the waiting room as subtely as possible and called the coroner's office to alert them that they would need to come pick up a body. He then caught an orderly and explained to her that no one was to enter Bianca Tolmen's room until the coroner arrived.

Procedural details taken care of, he returned to the waiting room to find Sam Tolmen exactly as he'd left him.

"Have you eaten anything?" he asked, and the young man looked up in surprise.

"Uh...no. They served us something on the plane, but I couldn't eat it." Sam ran a hand across his face.

Warrick checked his watch. Almost nine p.m. "Okay. We need to wait for just a little while longer, and then what do you think about grabbing some food?"

Sam shrugged, docile. "Yeah." They were quiet for a few minutes, and then he leaned back in his chair in an almost violent motion, bringing a hand up to rub at his jaw. "He didn't come. Bastard."

Warrick decided to press gently for background. "You went to college together?"

"UNLV, class of '01."

"Class of '95, myself."

"Nice."

They shared mutual small smiles steeped in memories of their alma mater, and then Warrick picked up the conversation again. "Did you know him well?"

"Oh, God, yeah. We were pretty tight. He was in the same year as Bianca and I." Sam paused. "We are - were - twins. Fraternal. Didn't know if you knew that. They say some twins have this...connection, but Bianca and I never did, not really. I didn't feel anything when...when she first..." He broke off. "We were close, though. We had to be. It was just us."

"Just you?" Warrick prompted.

"Our parents died when we were fourteen. Car accident. We got bounced around foster families for a little while, until we were eighteen. Then we took the insurance money and went to UNLV. It was just enough." He paused and looked into the distance. "Bianca and Carter met freshman year, at some party. It was pretty much instant. By sophomore year it was a question of when he would propose rather than whether he would propose."

"But he changed."

"Senior year, his mother died. Cancer - it was fast. And then...I don't really know what happened. He didn't deal with it well. He started getting fanatically religious. By that time, I was deep into my thesis work and...I didn't notice. I should have. But I just didn't. And this is all in hindsight. At the time, it was just like he was getting quieter, more private. It wasn't until Bianca called me last week that I knew there as a real problem. But going back through the memories of it all...I can see it. It was there." Swiftly, he pounded a fist into an end table, and Warrick jumped at the sudden movement. "And now he killed her. Oh, God, she's dead."

The news seemed to be hitting him in waves. While in a calm period he was detached, able to talk freely, and then it crested again, as now, and the sadness overtook him again. It was a pattern Warrick had seen countless times; one of the mind's coping mechanisms for intense grief. Eventually, the peaks and valleys would even out, and it would no longer be an active effort to remain composed.

For now, the best thing would be to keep him distracted. As if on cue, a man Warrick recognized as part of the day shift coroner crew poked his head into the waiting room. "Warrick, we've got it from here."

"Thanks," he replied, nodding. "Let's get that food," he suggested to Sam, holding out a hand. The young man looked at it in confusion for a moment, and then pulled himself out of the chair and followed the CSI from the waiting room.

Catherine entered the break room to find Nick leaning over in front of the microwave. She stopped for a second to enjoy the view, and then moved over to stand next to him. "Grissom has his cell phone turned off."

Nick jumped, nearly catching her chin with his elbow as he straightened, and glared at her. "Don't sneak up on me like that." She smiled in apology, and he relented. "He was still doing interviews when I left. He probably turned it off so he wouldn't be distracted."

She felt someting like fury rumble in her stomach. "I got here as soon as possible, and he's not even back yet?"

"Nope. Sorry." Nick turned back to the microwave and squinted inside.

"Whatever that is, it smells like it died," she told him. "And you're not supposed to stare right into the microwave."

He flicked his eyes sideways at her and then, defiantly, returned them to the microwave. "It's leftover chicken casserole. And I didn't think it was that old."

"You made chicken casserole?" she asked in surprise.

He didn't even bother to look affronted. "No. My sister was here two weeks ago. Business trip. She decided to stock up my fridge with wholesome food after she saw all the frozen dinners in my freezer."

"Two weeks ago," Catherine said flatly.

"Yeah." He frowned at the rotating tupperware. "It didn't smell that bad before I put it in." The microwave dinged to a finish and he opened the door with a pop. The wafting smell could have rivaled one of Grissom's experiments for nauseating factor. He sighed and dumped the congealed mass into the trash.

"You want to go grab something?" Catherine offered in consolement. "I haven't had anything but a chocolate chip cookie and some bug juice."

"Bug juice?" he asked. "You've been hanging around Grissom too long."

"Ha ha." She rolled her eyes at him. "Girl Scout meeting. Indeterminate Kool-Aid of the week."

"Lindsey?" At her nod, he smiled. "All my sisters were into that. Camp was the best two weeks of my summer."

She snorted. "This is the first summer she'll go to overnight camp."

"You'll miss her."

Catherine confirmed that with a wistful smile. "She's looking forward to it so much."

He returned her smile with a confident one. "She'll miss you too. C'mon, let's get something to eat."

Sara hummed softly under her breath and took another bite of her sandwich, setting it down to flip another page.

"You're going through that pretty fast."

She looked up to see Grissom looking down and upside down at where her finger currently was on the page. Swallowing peanut butter, she cleared out her mouth to talk. "It's a good play. How did the interviews go?"

"Every time we broaden the interview pool, we get more suspects. It seems like almost everyone in that theater had a reason to kill Bianca Tolmen."

"But only one person actually did," she stated unnecessarily. "There's another sandwich on your desk, if you want. Wheat bread, even."

He looked at her in surprise. "When did you make sandwiches?"

"While you were in the shower." She took another bite and swallowed, setting the book down to lick grape jelly off her finger and smirking inwardly at the slight narrowing of his eyes. "When you think about it, it actually takes even less energy than ordering out."

"Really?" he asked, his eyes still fixed on her finger. She'd missed a bit of jelly around the second knuckle. Permitting herself the indulgence, she sucked it off and then wiped her finger on a napkin.

"Mhm. With ordering out, you have to get up to go to the door, pay the delivery guy, bring the food back to the table, get utensils, all that stuff. PB&amp;J, all you have to do is move maybe two feet around the kitchen and spread the stuff on bread."

"How very scientific of you," he murmured, finally tearing his eyes away from her finger and turning to set his binder on his desk, exchanging it for the sandwich. "Brown paper bag?"

"I felt like going all out," she replied, suddenly self-conscious. "There's milk in the fridge. Next to the jar of...green stuff. What is that, anyway?"

"Algae," he offered, his voice slightly muffled as his back was turned to her while he opened the fridge. "For testing linear regression on bodies found in swamps."

"Grissom," she said, trying to keep the amusement out of her voice, "I can pretty much guarantee you that we are never going to have a body left in a swamp in Las Vegas."

He shrugged, and turned around, milk in hand, to sit at his desk. The paper bag crackled as he reached in to pull out the sandwich. "I was curious."

She grinned at him, understanding completely.

They finished their dinner in comfortable silence.  



	14. Sign and Semblance Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warrick looked up in surprise; he'd assumed the other man hadn't heard him, and he'd been prepared to just let it go. "What do you do now?" he followed up.

"Compsci major," Sam answered, at least five minutes after Warrick had asked him the question. "I always liked numbers, and gadgets." He swirled ketchup around with a limp fry, eyes carefully fixed on his plate.

Warrick looked up in surprise; he'd assumed the other man hadn't heard him, and he'd been prepared to just let it go. "What do you do now?" he followed up.

"I'm in Reno, working for a company that designs new computer gambling applications. Mostly variations on electronic blackjack, poker, that kind of thing." He finally ate the fry.

"Sin City enters the digital age," Warrick observed, and was gratified when Sam snorted.

"Yeah, I guess. I didn't want to go far, y'know? Vegas is home. And if you want to stay in Vegas, that means you're probably involved in gambling somehow."

"True." Even as a CSI, gambling still played a large role in his life. No larger than he let it, he chided himself silently, and decided to change the subject. "We probably had some of the same professors, then. First-year calculus at least."

"Professor Throckmorton," Sam answered easily with a ghost of a smile. "And that ridiculous hat."

Warrick snorted. "I bet he was still using the same transparencies when you went."

"Wouldn't surprise me. They certainly looked old enough to have been around since the sixties, at least."

"Yeah, he was, then."

They fell into silence for a few seconds, and Sam twitched his fingers, fidgeting with the paper napkin, ripping the edges into strips. "So when can you arrest Carter?"

Warrick leaned back. "If we find enough evidence linking him to the poison, then we can present it to the DA and ask for an arrest warrant. But right now we barely have enough for a search warrant, and in the interests of good public relations, we need to at least make contact with him first."

"He's not answering you, either?" Sam scowled. "He's probably gone."

Any further information provided and he could be accused of compromising the case, so he kept silent. "I really can't talk about it."

"Yeah. Sure. I understand." Sam leaned back in his side of the booth and looked out at the dusty parking lot. It was patently obvious that he didn't understand, but he kept quiet anyway.

The waitress came and they confirmed that they were not interested in dessert; she filled out the bill for them right there and they pooled money in the middle of the formica table to pay for their meals.

"I'll drop you off at your hotel - where are you staying?" Warrick asked. He'd driven them here; Sam had taken a taxi from the airport.

"I'd planned on staying with Bianca," Sam answered. His lips twisted and he looked away again.

"Her apartment is still a crime scene," the CSI said as gently as possible. "I know a good place not far from the Strip. I'll take you there."

"Yeah, thanks. That would be good." Sam had once again faded into the distance, operating on rote reaction.

"Anything else for me, Greg?" Sara asked, leaning in to the DNA lab.

He bobbed his head in what she thought was an affirmative until she noticed that he had headphones on. As she watched, he shoved himself off and sent his chair gliding across the lab to another machine - and the headphones stayed with him. No cord. She wouldn't put it past him to be wearing them as some sort of fashion statement, but he hadn't heard her. There had to be music pumping through them somehow.

Intrigued, she stepped forward until she was right next to him and pulled up one side to talk directly into his ear. "Greg?"

He jumped, and threw the headphones down on the lab table. "Don't sneak up on me like that!"

"I've been here for at least two minutes," she pointed out. "New toy?"

"Aren't they great?" Greg crowed, passing over the headphones and pointing toward what she assumed was a broadcasting station over by the boombox. "Wireless, baby."

"Nice," she said appreciatively. It was handy - he would be able to move freely about the lab and still listen to his music as loudly as he wanted without disturbing anyone. "You're going to blow your eardrums out."

"Life is short," he countered as she passed the headphones back to him and he hooked them around his neck.

"Right," she said dryly. "Anyway, do you have anything else for me? I'm on my way to a team meeting."

"Ah. Yes." Another push with his feet sent him sailing behind her to retrieve several more printouts from a lab table across the room. "Routine stuff. I confirmed that the pills were, in fact, folic acid. The blood on the blanket was a match to the the vaginal stains on the victim's sheets. And," he held up a finger, "I also ran the stuff Grissom collected from the chair in the dressing room."

"Really?" She blinked. She'd very nearly forgotten about that evidence. "Good work, Greg."

"Yeah, well," he said modestly. "Mostly, you've got some food stains. Peanut butter, chocolate, orange juice. Then we've got the semen stains." He stood and reached into a file cabinet at the end of the lab table. "Just in case you didn't have the results I gave you earlier on you. I also went back and looked at the bedsheet stains and arranged them in order of oldest to most recent." He spread them out in that order. "It goes something like this - four stains, same person, all at least six months old. Two stains, same person, from the last month or two, the newest dating from a week and a half ago. One stain, one person - obviously - two to three days old." He pushed them forward and laid out the new printouts underneath them. "From the chair, four stains. All belonging to the second time period - the last one to two months." He pulled those sheets from the first pile.

"Match," Sara breathed. "She slept with someone from the theater in her apartment at least twice."

"Exactly."

"Very good work, Greg," she praised, and he beamed.

"Sorry I'm late," Sara apologized, breezing in to the layout room, and Grissom nodded in acknowledgement.

"Let's get started," he began, and the CSIs around the table straightened slightly, fingertips on the manila folders full of evidence in front of them. "Sara, you were doing background."

"Right," she confirmed, and began to sketch out Bianca Tolmen for them. She talked about her days at UNLV - Warrick providing a sounding board for various on-campus references - and brought them up to when the young actress had joined the company.

"I can take it from there," Warrick said. "I talked to her brother at the hospital. She became engaged to Carter James in her freshman year, but by senior year, they were having difficulties, mostly due to disagreements over his increasingly conservative stance on religion. Apparently about a week ago, he tried to forbid her to continue acting. She called her brother, and he was scheduled to fly in this weekend anyway, to mediate possibly."

"Her first major role was as Hippolyta in Midsummer Night's Dream, opposite Richard Ellory as Theseus. She auditioned for and won the part of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing over several other actresses in the company who had been there longer than she had, among them Mallory Smith and Josephine Calvert," Grissom continued.

"The same Mallory Smith who has been seeing Richard Ellory for nearly five months now. We know that Ellory and Bianca had a short-lived affair that ended approximately a week ago," Nick interjected. "I don't like Mallory for it, but we did hit a nerve when we questioned her about Ellory. She turned right around and fingered Calvert. Said they hated each other."

"Who is a slippery one," Catherine picked up, a wry grin on her face. "I can see her doing it, but I don't see enough motive. She's secure in her position. She's not going to let someone like Bianca worry her."

"We have several witnesses attesting to bad blood between Bianca and Calvert," Grissom reminded her. "Moral differences."

Catherine seemed to consider that for a moment, and then shook her head. "I still don't see it. Like I said, she was confident. She has it all and it would take a lot more than an upstart actress to make her lose it."

"They wouldn't be competing for the same roles anyway," Sara put in. "Different age brackets."

"True. Who else?"

"The fiancé," Warrick said without hesitation. "Someone left twelve messages on her answering machine. I'm going to have Sam Tolmen come in and do an ID. After that, we'll run it through for voiceprint comparison. But that says to me he was seriously jealous. If he found out about her affair with Ellory..." He left the sentence hanging.

"We can't afford to assume anything," Grissom reminded them all, unecessarily. "Ellory himself is just as likely a suspect. She broke up with him, not the other way around, and we have an eyewitness who overheard heated words between them."

"And what does he have to say for himself?" Catherine asked.

"He admitted to the affair and the heated words without even hesitating. Even cooler than Calvert." Grissom tapped a pen against the table. "Now, what do we have for evidence to tie any of our suspects to the crime?"

"No poison," Nick said in frustration. "Greg and I went over every single bit of food and makeup that she might have come into contact with. Nothing."

"The autopsy is scheduled for an hour from now," Warrick said. "We'll know more about how she came into contact with it then."

"Here's something we didn't get from any eyewitness reports," Sara said triumphantly. "I think she was pregnant. She had prescription folic acid in her bathroom, and I just got the confirmation from Greg that the contents are in fact folic acid."

"Whoa." Catherine blinked. "The question is, who's the daddy?"

"Semen stains on both her bedsheets and the chair in the dressing room suggest at least three lovers within the past six months. We'll have to wait for the autopsy to see how far along she was. Either way, the most recent stain dates from within the past two or three days and is the only occurence of that DNA, so it's not him." Sara paused in thought. "That points to either the fiancé - Carter James - or Ellory. Maybe she threatened to tell Smith."

"I don't think he would have cared," Grissom said carefully. "He didn't seem particularly concerned with how she would react to news of his affair. It doesn't appear that he takes the relationship very seriously."

"Motive for Mallory Smith," Warrick pointed out.

"They say poison is a woman's weapon," Nick mused, and both Catherine and Sara pinned him with a glare. "But, uh, it can also be a man's, of course." He withered in his seat.

"It is true," Sara admitted. "It's the most popular choice for premeditated murder among women," she added softly, and looked up to see Grissom watching her intently. She gave him a half-smile to let him know that she'd put it behind her, as much as she ever could, and he nodded slightly in acknowledgement.

"Archie and I went over the tape of the performance," Warrick said, breaking the few seconds of silence. "If you ask me, they're all guilty. There was no way anyone within five feet couldn't tell something was seriously wrong with her."

"The show must go on," Grissom stated, and Warrick grimaced.

"Yeah, that's what Archie said."

Nick picked up the thread of conversation. "Fibers found on the chair in the dressing room. The white has a triangular weave - probably from a carpet - and the black is matted, finely woven wool. My guess is from a coat."

"There was white carpet on stage," Catherine realized.

"Well, then, I'll go get a sample tonight," Nick said with a smile in her direction.

"The white powder from the chair turned out to be powdered sugar, so dead end there, unless we can find someone whose identifying characteristic is that he eats powdered doughnuts," Sara said with a smile. "But the beige residue that we've been finding everywhere - dressing room, onstage, and bedsheets - is a little more interesting." She set the printouts into the middle of the table for everyone to read. "The residue found in the theater is sawdust from a wood typically used in set building. It doesn't give us much, but someone involved in the set building was in Bianca's dressing room that day. The sawdust from the bedsheets is a different kind - more specialized. Greg says it probably had to be ordered."

"I took a sample from the clothes of the prop manager, a Neil Meadows," Grissom said. "Greg should be working on it right now. We'll see if it matches the residue found in the theater. And as it turns out - Richard Ellory is an amateur boat-builder."

She grinned at him, lips curling back to reveal her teeth. "Why don't I find out if this kind of wood is used in boats?" For a moment, it was just the two of them in the room, and then she ducked her head to pull the shoeprint matches out of her folder. "I've got more than half of the shoeprints eliminated, but none of the fingerprints matched."

"Fingerprints and DNA samples of everyone in the cast who submitted voluntarily - and there were only two or three stagehands who refused - should be on their way back with the officers who were doing interviews. Tonight we'll start to eliminate. The shoeprints are only class evidence - when we get warrants, we can use them to strengthen a case, but we can't build a case with them." Grissom tapped the ever-present pen against his lips as he recited the Crim 101 information almost to himself.

They were all silent for a few seconds, letting the information sink in.

"Brass should be working on warrants for Carter James and Richard Ellory's apartments," Grissom finally said. "When they come through, Catherine, I want you and Sara to go to James's apartment. In the meantime, you'll be in the autopsy with me, and Sara, I want you to work on the paper trail. See if you can get Bianca Tolmen's medical records released and find out when she knew she was pregnant."

"Joy," Sara muttered under her breath, and offered him a sweet smile when he raised an eyebrow at her.

"Warrick and I will search Ellory's apartment. Until that warrant comes through, I'll also be in the autopsy and I want you on the answering machine tape, Warrick."

"What about me?" Nick asked.

"You need to find that poison," Grissom informed him, and was inwardly amused when the younger CSI fought to suppress a groan.  



	15. Sign and Semblance Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Catherine nodded. "The hospital reports strychnine based on blood tests soon after admittance." At Grissom's sideward glance, she raised an eyebrow at him. "We'll confirm, of course."

"Bianca Tolmen, age twenty-three," Robbins said as they looked down at the cloth covered body. "Not as much of a mystery as my guests usually are."

Catherine nodded. "The hospital reports strychnine based on blood tests soon after admittance." At Grissom's sideward glance, she raised an eyebrow at him. "We'll confirm, of course."

"Already done," Robbins said. "Her system tested positive for massive amounts of strychnine. I've sent it to the labs, but based on the concentration in the blood, I'd say it's not available over the counter. You're looking for someone with access to raw poison, not the weakened substance they use in pesticides now."

"It's not especially difficult to come by," Grissom pointed out. "Ranchers used it for years. Anyone with the right connections could get their hands on it."

Robbins shrugged. "All I can tell you is what was in her body. Head to toes," he began, gesturing. "Severe bruising and lacerations around the back of her skull. Based on symptoms of strychnine poisoning, I'd say she hit her head while seizing. The wounds certainly seem to be consistent with that time frame."

"Nick collected a bloody blanket from where they had her lying down. They said she thrashed a good deal," Catherine confirmed, and Robbins nodded.

"Petechial hemorrhaging. Again, not uncommon in suffocation victims. Her lips and tongue were cut up as well - the marks are consistent with her own teeth." The sheet was moved aside as they continued down her body. "Multiple bruises on her wrists, shoulders, and ankles, all inflicted within the past twenty-four hours."

Grissom angled his arm and without touching, was able to spread his fingers to match up with five finger-shaped bruises on her right shoulder. "They were holding her down."

"Makes sense. She would have been suffering from repeated grand mal seizures." Robbins shrugged. "I haven't found anything yet to indicate that there was any foul play - other than the poison, that is. I haven't opened her up yet, but the hospital's cause of death was brain-death from lack of oxygen caused by repeated and severe seizures. There's nothing on her body at odds with that - no bruising that I wouldn't expect to be there, no foreign chemicals aside from the strychnine."

"How far along was she?" Catherine asked softly.

"Excuse me?"

"We have reason to believe she was pregnant when she died. A prescription for folic acid was found in her bathroom," Grissom brought the coroner up to speed.

The sheet came down further to reveal a perfectly flat stomach. "Not far. She's not even showing. I'll be able to tell you more when I open her up."

"What about how she was poisoned?" Catherine asked.

"That is a bit of a mystery. No needle marks anywhere on her body, so it wasn't subcutaneous. I heard that all the food and makeup tested negative?" At Grissom and Catherine's nods, he shrugged. "That leaves respiratory. I'll swab her nose and mouth and send it to the labs."

"Respiratory?" Grissom asked in surprise. "I thought strychnine was only an ingested poison."

"Usually, it is. But it can be inhaled," Robbins explained as he carefully swabbed Bianca's left and then right nostril. "And with the concentration we're dealing with here, even one deep breath would have been enough to kill her if the symptoms weren't recognized and treated immediately."

"They weren't. She was onstage for at least ten minutes after she fainted." Grissom's voice was full of suppressed anger.

"Well, we'll never know if the extra ten minutes are what killed her, but they didn't help her. And whoever poisoned her intended her to die, there's no doubt about that."

"All right, Greggo," Nick said, clapping his hands together. "We need to go over everything that might have come into contact with Bianca Tolmen last night."

"You're kidding me, right?" Greg asked, staring blankly.

"I wish." He hefted the box off his hip and set it on the lab table. "Everything in this box was in the dressing room. She went right from the dressing room to the stage. Strychnine takes effect within fifteen minutes to a half an hour. Ergo..."

"She was poisoned in her dressing room." Greg scowled at the cardboard box.

"Exactly." Nick pulled out a swab from the box. "First things first. This is a sample of what was believed on the scene to be water, found on her dressing table. Run it through and give me good news."

"Your wish is my command," the lab tech snarked, and spun his chair around to begin preparing the swab.

Nick laid out the rest of the items on the table. Three books. Her purse, and its contents. The water bottle had already been tested, but he frowned at the bottle of pale aqua antibacterial gel. Anything was possible, he told himself, and set it aside for Greg to test next. The contents of the trash: roses, empty blush container, tissue with makeup stains, Luna bar wrapper. The wrapper went next to the antibacterial gel as next to test.

"Like I said," Greg told him with a smirk, coming up behind him and handing him a printout. "Here's the part where I make your wish...come true."

Nick's jaw dropped as he read the printout. Faint traces of C21H22N2O2 - strychnine. "But that's probably not enough to kill a mouse, let alone a human being." He dropped the printout and returned to the contents of the dressing room where they were spread out along the table. "But what was in the water?"

The roses.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Greg said in disbelief.

Nick took a swab and picked up one long-stemmed rose, wilting now from its time in the brown paper bag. Carefully, he swabbed the stem and passed the sample to Greg, and then using tweezers, he pried apart the petals of the flower.

White powder fell out and onto the counter.

"Bingo," he muttered. "Oh, no one is ever going to believe this."

"It's like something out of a lame movie," Greg agreed, and kept the bindle at arm's length as he walked it over to the machine.

They watched the GC/MS hum and whir and click, arms crossed against their chests, and Nick jumped when the printer whirred into life. He snatched up the printout and gave a low whistle. "That is some concentrated stuff. No wonder it killed her."

"Shouldn't we, ah..." Greg gestured at the roses nervously.

"Right." Moving slowly, Nick slid the roses, stem first, into a large hazmat bag and sealed it off carefully, and then disinfected the counter where the strychnine had spilled out from the rose petals. Materials for cleanup were available in every lab - they dealt with potentially dangerous substances too often for safety precautions to be anything other than an arm's length away.

"Yes, I know what doctor-patient confidentiality is," Sara explained, wondering if the secretary on the other line could hear her grounding her teeth. "It doesn't extend after death."

"Then we need a copy of a death certificate," the man said pompously.

"Listen - I'm sorry, what was your name?"

"Paul."

"Okay, Paul. She died in your hospital about three hours ago. She was murdered. Why don't you help me out a little bit here, and make a call to your records people?"

"You have to understand, if I make an exception for you, I have to start making exceptions for everyone - "

"She was murdered. This is an active criminal investigation. Make an exception." She slammed down the phone, feeling childishly glad at the vehement gesture.

"Well." Catherine said from the doorway. "I think you got your point across."

Sara winced and blushed slightly. "Yeah, that was a little over the top."

The other woman shrugged. "It happens. I know I've wanted to do it before." She took a few steps into the room. "I have something that might make your night a bit better, though." She held a slip of paper between two fingers and waved it enticingly.

"The warrant for Carter James's place," Sara recognized. "Bonus."

On the way across town, Sara perused the PD's background check that had come with the warrant. "Carter James, twenty-three, attending UNLV Med School. Graduated with honors, biochem major, pre-med track. Originally from Los Angeles, California - big money family. Apparently he's benefiting form a trust fund. That must be how he took her to Venice. Uhm...nothing else really outstanding. Only child, mother died last year. According to witness testimony from Bianca's brother, they've been dating for almost five years now and engaged for two."

"Motive," Catherine supplied. "Warrick talked to the brother, and he's pretty convinced that James is our guy."

"Right." Sara wrinkled her nose. "The religion thing."

"The jealousy thing," Catherine corrected. "People do things for their own reasons. Religion is just his own flimsy excuse to be more controlling. It happens more often than you'd think."

"You sound like Grissom," Sara muttered back, suitably chastised.

That brought a tight smile to the other CSI's face as she turned the wheel to pull into the parking lot of Carter James's apartment complex. They parked in between a BMW and a Lexus, in front of a carefully groomed garden area that had no doubt been very expensively irrigated. Catherine let out a low whistle, and Sara raised an eyebrow in appreciation as they exited the car to find Detective Erin Conroy waiting for them at the entrance.

"About time," she teased good-naturedly. "That guy in there's been giving me the fish-eye for the past twenty minutes." Erin had been elsewhere in Vegas when the warrant had been approved, and it had fallen to the criminalists to bring it with them to meet her there.

Sara leaned over slightly, beyond where Erin's body was blocking her view, to see a prim and stiff looking young man in a suit standing just inside the double glass doors. "Traffic," she replied by way of explanation, leaning back to address the detective again.

Erin rolled her eyes at the criminalists. "Shall we?"

Catherine gestured with the hand holding her collection kit. "After you."

The bellhop opened the door, letting them into the first part of the doubled glass door entrance. The air conditioner was pumping away, and while it would have been a welcome relief to have entered into the chill air had they been visiting at high noon, in the middle of the night it was mildly annoying and Sara shivered involuntarily.

"May I ask on the part of whom you are here today?" he asked pompously, and all three women stared at him.

"Carter James," Erin said, and Catherine handed over the warrant. "Seen him lately?"

"I have not. I will ask you to return at a later date, when Mr. James is at home to answer your request."

"The warrant doesn't say he needs to be there," Sara said, angry, and reminded of the hospital secretary she had been wrestling with earlier. "Let us in." She hesitated a beat, and then added, "Please."

After an agonizing five minutes where the bellhop - he couldn't possibly be more than nineteen - examined every word of the warrant, he pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and dialed, handing the warrant back to Catherine but not taking his eyes off them as he spoke. "Mr. Levinson? It's Mark. There are three police officers here who say they have a warrant to search Mr. James's apartment. Yes, sir. Yes, I understand." He closed the cell phone. "Mr. Levinson will be with you in a moment."

"We're not police officers, Mark," Catherine pointed out. "Ms. Sidle and I are criminalists. Detective Conroy is the police officer."

He just looked at them with distaste, and there were a few minutes of silent stand-off before the inner glass door opened and an older man dressed in a carefully tailored suit entered the small outer area, which had not been designed to hold five people at once, and there were a few seconds of hasty shifting to allow for more comfort standing there. Sara found herself directly underneath the air conditioning vent, and groaned inwardly even as she pulled the light jacket around her more tightly.

"Arthur Levinson," the man introduced himself, holding out his hand to shake each of theirs in turn. "What can I do for you this evening?"

Evening was a relative term, Sara reflected. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning.

"We have a warrant to search Carter James's apartment," Erin explained, taking the paper from Catherine's hands to give it to the manager. "The Las Vegas Police Department would appreciate any assistance you provide in this matter."

As Mark had before him, Levinson studied every word while Sara was fairly sure she was losing feeling in the hand that was curled around the handle of her evidence kit. The other was stuffed firmly in the pocket of her jacket.

"I see." He rolled the words around in his mouth as if they tasted sour. "Please follow me."

She allowed herself the sigh of relief as Levinson led them throught the second door and into a thickly carpeted hallway area, tastefully accentuated with pale wood panelling. They rounded a corner and entered an elevator, taking it up to the fourth floor, and exited onto a hall that looked exactly the same as the one they had just left.

"This is Mr. James's apartment," Levinson explained as they stopped in front of an oak door with "43" in brass lettering. He knocked briskly, and they all waited a few seconds. No answer.

"Please open the door, Mr. Levinson," Erin instructed, and unbuttoned her holster to take her service revolver out.

"There is no need to draw your weapon - "

"Procedure. Please open the door."

His movements jerky, Levinson pulled a ring of keys from his jacket pocket and fumbled with them for a few seconds before fitting one to the lock on the door and pushing it open. The interior of the apartment was dark, and Erin shouldered the door open, gun held at the ready. She took two steps before stopping and calling back to Catherine and Sara, "Am I okay to turn on the light?"

There was no reason she wouldn't be, so Catherine answered in the affirmative.

"Something reeks in here - " and the sentence was broken off abruptly as Erin found the light switch. "Oh my God," she breathed, and Sara tried desperately to see around the only halfway open door. "You need to get in here."

Catherine was closer to the door, but Sara was close on her heels as they pushed open the door the rest of the way, Levinson hovering worriedly behind them.

The instant Sara stepped inside the apartment, the odor alerted her as to what she would find. The thick, acrid smell of copper hung in the warm air, and she pressed the back of her hand against her nostrils briefly to relieve the scent, shaking her head to clear it and then taking a few more steps forward, the nausea vanquished by force of will.

Blood, everywhere - the living room of the apartment was like a psychopathic Pollock painting in 3D. It was almost dizzying, the sheer amount sprayed on the walls, soaked into the carpet, spattered and dripped across every surface.

"I think we have a new case," Catherine murmured as behind them, Levinson emptied his stomach into the hallway.  



	16. Sign and Semblance Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Dusted in the petals. Greg just ran the swabs Robbins sent us from her nose and mouth, and the sample from her nose was full of the stuff. My guess, she got them, took a deep whiff, and after that..." Nick left the sentence hanging.

"It was in the roses?" Grissom asked, surprised.

"Dusted in the petals. Greg just ran the swabs Robbins sent us from her nose and mouth, and the sample from her nose was full of the stuff. My guess, she got them, took a deep whiff, and after that..." Nick left the sentence hanging.

"We need to find out who ordered those roses." Grissom rounded the corner and pushed the doors to the parking lot open.

"Already started. Vega is going back through the statements from everyone who was at the theater that night to see who brought them to the dressing room. They had to have been delivered during the production itself to get there with the right timing. I'm headed down to Ronnie right now to see what he can tell me about the card."

"Keep me posted," Grissom ordered curtly and shut the phone, lost in thought on the way to the Tahoe. Even if they did find who ordered the roses, it still wasn't the smoking gun they needed. Presuming they'd arrived by the front door, someone would have had to have been in the lobby to carry them up to the dressing room, and then after that, anyone passing by the room could have poisoned them.

Then again, if they could match match class evidence - the shoeprints, the sawdust - to someone in the cast, it would give them an idea. And, of course, if they could find the paraphenalia used to make the strychnine, then they would have a much stronger case.

Conceivably, they would be doing that right now. Warrick jerked his chin in greeting from where he waited next to the Tahoe. "Hey. I got your page."

"Brass is meeting us there with the warrant," Grissom told him.

On the car ride to Richard Ellory's apartment, the entomologist filled him in on the details about the roses, and Warrick returned the favor by telling him about the time spent with Archie analyzing the answering machine tape.

"We've got a positive match to the twelve calls. They're all the same person. We also got ahold of the phone records; all of the calls were placed from Carter James's apartment. Hopefully Sara and Catherine can get an exemplar from his apartment to prove that it was him calling. The other two calls were from Scott Loring; he's already admitted as much. The last call was from the local library, and phone records confirm that. Completely innocuous. We also pulled her cell phone records, and she made two calls that day: one to her home answering machine, to check messages, and one to Scott Loring, probably confirming the dinner date."

"I wonder why her James didn't call her cell phone?" Grissom mused out loud.

"Maybe she didn't tell him she had it. She only signed up for the plan two months ago. Her brother said that things had been starting to go sour between her and James, so maybe she was trying to put some distance between them."

"Possible. Anything in her cell phone voice mail?"

"Nothing. She'd erased everything that morning."

They were silent for a few minutes, and then Grissom broke the quiet abruptly. "Where is her cell phone?"

"What do you mean?" Warrick frowned as he applied the brakes so as not to rear-end the expensive rental car in front of him. Tourists.

"We didn't log a cell phone into evidence. Where is it?" Grissom's voice rose in agitation. "We completely missed a piece of the puzzle."

"It could be nothing," Warrick felt obliged to point out.

"Or it could be everything. We need to find it." There was really no arguing with that, so Warrick nodded in agreement.

The rest of the ride was accomplished in silence as Grissom brooded and Warrick tried to wrack his brain to think of all the places a small cell phone could have gone missing. It looked like they were going back to Bianca's apartment sometime soon.

Richard Ellory's apartment was more of a townhouse, situated in a quasi-residential area that had all the signs of an upper middle class neighborhood. Few of the lights were on in the buildings around them, and they were the only moving car on the street as they pulled to a stop behind Brass's nondescript Taurus.

He answered the door himself, wide awake and twirling a glass of wine in his fingers. "May I help you?"

Brass held up the warrant with a smug grin. "We have a warrant to search these premises."

For a moment, Richard's eyes grew cold and hard. "I don't lie, officer, Mr. Grissom. I told you that I had nothing to do with Bianca's unfortunate death, and I meant it."

"Don't take this personally, Mr. Ellory, but I don't believe you," Grissom said bluntly. "People lie. I put my faith in the evidence."

"You won't find any of that here," Richard rebutted.

Grissom shrugged. "I'd like to look anyway."

Tension hung in the air for a few seconds, and Richard stepped back from the door, holding it open for the three men to enter the townhouse. When the door swung open further, it revealed Mallory Smith standing behind Richard, her face tight with anger, another wine glass in her hand.

"Ms. Smith," Brass greeted her. "Imagine seeing you here."

She merely acknowledged him with a frosty nod, then turned her back to them and exited the room.

"Help yourself," Richard said, spreading his arms. "I have nothing to hide."

He was either an innocent man or a very good liar, Grissom reflected, and then chided himself for listening to the people before the evidence. "Warrick, shoes. And if you could please show me to where you keep your boat, Mr. Ellory."

Richard indicated the direction of his bedroom with a hand wave, and the CSI departed in that direction. "Follow me, Mr. Grissom." He led Brass and Grissom down a hallway that led out to a spacious two-car garage - something of an oddity for such a small townhouse, but judging by the car and the boat taking up the space, a needed addition.

It wasn't very far along; more than half the ribs were bare under the weak light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Rounding the frame carefully, Grissom knelt to the floor and scooped a small amount of sawdust from a pile left under the bow into a bindle. "How often do you work on this?"

"Whenever I can. Sometimes I can't touch it for a week, and others I work on it for five hours a day. Properly made boats take months of constant work to finish, and with my sporadic schedule, it's going to be years yet before I finish this." Richard's voice floated over from the garage door, and the pride in it was evident. "Is there anything else you need in here?"

Because he got the sense that Richard was trying to hurry them along, Grissom deliberately slowed. "Nothing in particular," he answered honestly, but made sure to take a stroll down to a cabinet. Inside were carefully arranged jars of nails and screws, hanging hand tools, and a few buckets of primer and lacquer. Only one was opened, but judging by the layer of dust across the top, it hadn't been touched for weeks. There was nothing else that suggested strychnine or any of its components.

Brass just watched him, knowing that if the criminalist found anything, he would say so. Eventually, Grissom finished his circuit of the garage. "Thank you for your cooperation," he said simply, with an ingratiating smile. "If we could just have a look around the rest of your apartment, we'll be out of your way."

A muscle in Richard's jaw twitched, and Grissom took a perverse enjoyment in cracking the man's perfect demeanor. Apparently the actor hadn't anticipated being confronted on his own turf, and was reacting badly to the invasion of his privacy. "If that's what it will take to convince you I didn't do this, you're welcome to."

Mallory was sitting on the couch in the living room when they re-entered after taking a side trip to the small laundry room off the garage hallway, and she refused to look up at any of the three men from where she sat, instead pretending absorption in a magazine.

The furnishings were classic, exposed wood and embroidered upholstery, and the walls were decorated with prints of eighteenth-century art; skinny horses and hunting dogs and garden parties. Behind a glass-fronted bookcase were leather bound volumes of literature. Grissom leaned over to study the titles; Marlowe, Moliere...alphabetical order. Out of curiosity, he skimmed down to Shakespeare.

"You know, Bianca Tolmen had these same editions in her dressing room table," he commented, opening the cabinet with a gloved hand to confirm his suspicions.

"They were a gift to the this fall's cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream by an anonymous benefactor," Richard said smoothly. "I didn't give them to her, if that's what you're asking."

"No, but you did give her something," Grissom rebutted, replacing the book and closing the cabinet door. "We found a card addressed to 'my Hippolyta' stuck in one of the books. A florist's card."

"Opening night," was his response. "I purchased a bouquet of mixed wildflowers for every woman in the production. Mallory and Josephine both received similar cards."

"Similar. But I doubt the sentiment was as intimate."

"I've already told you that we became good friends over the course of the production."

"So you have."

The kitchen showed signs of recent cleaning, and there were dishes drying on a towel next to the sink. A bottle of white wine was breathing on the counter, and Grissom bagged a salt shaker and a sugar bowl.

"You think I'd leave poison out on my kitchen counter," Richard said flatly.

"That would be a theory, Mr. Ellory. I don't work theories. I work evidence. And at this stage of the investigation, everything is evidence."

There was nothing else that could double for strychnine in the kitchen or in the bathroom, and coming out of the bathroom Grissom met Warrick, leaving from the bedroom further down the hall.

"One match," the younger man said, holding up a bagged pair of dress shoes.

Grissom swiveled on his heel to confront Richard. "You were in Ms. Tolmen's dressing room within twenty-four hours of her death."

"Yes. I wished her good night the night before. She was already ready by the time I arrived that day, hence no need to go in her dressing room then. I imagine quite a few people were in her dressing room over those twenty-four hours. It was only a private area in theory. If you checked my dressing room, you'd probably find her shoeprints in there."

He did have a point. And there was no way to tell how old the print was; the dressing rooms were vaccuumed every other day, and the day Bianca had died had been an off day, so anything on the floor could have been just as easily from the day before.

Grissom and Warrick searched the study together, once again coming up with nothing, while Richard waited for them in the doorway, arms crossed, and Brass studied the few personal photographs that hung on the walls.

"Is that Steven Spielberg?" the detective asked, indicating a particular photo with a finger.

"Yes. I worked with him on White Heat when I was in Hollywood."

"Never heard of it."

"That doesn't surprise me. It was a small, independent film. The director was a friend of Mr. Spielberg's."

"And there's our sheriff."

"Brian and I were good friends in college. We still are." He left unspoken the fact that as soon as Sheriff Mobley learned that they were searching Richard's townhouse, he would come down on them, hard. It had been no small feat to keep the news from him even in the few hours it had been since the warrant had been approved.

Just then, Grissom's cell phone rang, and he made an annoyed moue as he stepped into the hallway to answer it while Warrick continued searching the desk drawers.

"You went behind my back, Grissom."

"I did not," Grissom pointed out to the sheriff. "I'm doing my job. Telling you my every move is not part of my job."

"Richard Ellory is innocent," Mobley huffed. "You're wasting our taxpayer's valuable time and money by pursuing him. From what I hear, the fiancé is a much more viable suspect."

Grissom thought about pointing out, as he had countless times before and already several times that same night, that at this stage everyone was a viable suspect. "CSIs Willows and Sidle are at Carter James's apartment right now."

There was a huff on the other end. "I'll be waiting for you to come see me as soon as you return to the lab."

Grissom was left with dial tone, and he folded his phone back up and returned to the study to see Warrick finishing the desk. "Thank you for your time and cooperation, Mr. Ellory. We'll be in touch."

"So, Ronnie," Nick said, rounding the corner into the QD lab and clapping his hands together. "What've you got for me?"

The tech looked up, startled for a moment, and then seemed to collect himself. "Not much, I'm afraid."

"Oh, don't tell me that."

"Sorry, nothing I can do about it." He scooted his chair over to a display area, where both florist's cards were suspended in glass. "On the first one, that Sara found in the dressing room, the water had degraded the card too badly to do much with it. By itself, it wouldn't hold up in court. But with this other one..." his waggled fingers indicated the second florist's card, from the copy of Shakespeare's comedies, "things get a little clearer."

He pushed backward and brought up a computer screen. "I reconstructed the writing and did a handwriting match." The words morphed, became less blurred as the pixels realigned and reconstructed the Bible quote. "Now, like I said, it probably won't hold up in court, but I can tell you that my professional opinion is that these two cards were written by the same person. Also," and he flicked a switch, now back at the display case, "the ink's flourescing at the same wavelength, and the thickness of the letters changes in the same area." Taking a pen and indicating what he was talking about as he spoke, he continued. "See the lower-case 'o's in Hippolyta and love? The thick dot there - probably where your writer started and ended the letter. And the ink's bled through to the other side of the card slightly. A felt pen, and one that was starting to run out by the time the roses card was written - he had to go over 'drown' twice."

"Anything else?" Nick asked. Ronnie had been right. There wasn't much. It was interesting, but it wasn't helping them to build their case.

"They're of the same brand of card," and here they rounded to the other side of the vertical display area and Ronnie once again indicated a portion of the card with his pen. "Besides the fact that they're the same size and material, here's the company's mark."

"Vernon Paper Products," Nick read. "Never heard of 'em."

"They're small, and local," the lab tech supplied helpfully. "I've had a few things from them come through before. Some specialized stationary on a kidnapping a few years ago, for one. I bet they don't supply too many places."

Nick clapped a hand on Ronnie's shoulder. "Thanks, man. That was a big help."

He left the QD lab and was on his way back to find a phone book and a quiet corner to call Vernon Paper Products with when he passed by the DNA lab and Greg gestured wildly for his attention. Frowning, he entered.

"I've been running all the samples the PD collected at the theater yesterday," Greg explained. "Everyone gave a voluntary swab after they were interviewed."

"And?"

"And I've identified our one-time donor on the bedsheets," he responded triumphantly and passed the sheet over. "Scott Loring."

"Scott Loring?" Nick asked incredulously. "He lied to us. Dammit, I had him figured for completely out of this."

"It's a match. Sometime in the past two or three days, he was at Bianca Tolmen's place doing the horizontal mambo. And since Doc Robbins sent me down a DNA sample to match, there's no longer reasonable doubt about with whom. All vaginal fluid on the sheets matches her." Greg shrugged. "Dunno what to tell you, but this baby does not fool around." He patted the instrument with gentle affection.

"Right," Nick muttered, looking at the paperwork in his hands. "Good work, Greg."

"Thank you." He positively beamed. "Oh, and the other samples. The middle samples on the sheets belonged to Richard Ellory, as did the stains Grissom lifted from the chair in the dressing room."

"No surprise there. He admitted as much. Thanks anyway. Cath and Sara will bring us a sample from the fiancé, and maybe we can eliminate the rest of the samples."

A rap on the door brought both their attention to Detective Vega. "I may have some good news for you. We have a statement from one of the actors - a Violet DuMarne - who says she saw Mallory Smith bringing a vase with a dozen roses from the lobby toward the dressing rooms during the production."

"Reaallly." Nick drew out the word. "Then I guess I'm going to go see if Jacqui could lift anything from that vase."

"And I'm going to go have Mallory Smith brought in for questioning," Vega added.

"And Scott Loring," Nick told him.

"Loring? Why?"

"He left his DNA on Bianca's bedsheets. We have a signed statement that he never had any sexual relations with her."

"Little lie, big lie," Greg piped up from behind Nick.

Vega just stared at the lab tech, and then seemed to shake himself. "Right. Well, I'll have them both in here."

"Beep me when they get here. I'll be in fingerprinting," Nick said, and Vega nodded and left. "Good work, Greggo," he tossed off before heading out in the direction of fingerprinting.  



	17. Sign and Semblance Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sara turned slowly, overwhelmed and nearly unsure of where to start. "This is like a textbook on mingled blood spatter. No way can we tell where one starts and the other begins."

"I'd say this is why we haven't been able to get ahold of him," Catherine murmured, and tracked her flashlight for a closer look at a particularly spectacular example.

Sara turned slowly, overwhelmed and nearly unsure of where to start. "This is like a textbook on mingled blood spatter. No way can we tell where one starts and the other begins."

"Oh, we can," Catherine corrected, kneeling down and squinting. "It'll just take time."

"Right." Sara blew an exasperated sigh out through her lips. "I'll start photographing, then."

There was no body. Erin had continued, gun drawn, through the rest of the spacious apartment and the CSIs had followed her while Levinson queried them in a shaking voice from the door. They'd instructed him to stay where he was and stay quiet, and after a few minutes of whining he seemed to have gotten the idea. After they had verified that the apartment was empty, Erin had left with Levinson to get the records for all visitors to the building, and to call in the new crime scene.

Whatever it was, it had started in the bedroom - probably the first blow had been struck in sleep. There was blood on the sheets and one of the walls, and then handprints and and long dragging marks that led out to the living room, where the rest of the blood was. At some point he'd managed to wrap a bloody palm around the front door; Sara's intuition was telling her that it had happened early in the struggle, and had perhaps been the catalyst for the explosion of violence that followed.

Two feet to the right of where Catherine was kneeling the blood had soaked deep into the carpet. Whoever had died - Carter James, or someone new to make this case even more complicated - had rested there for some time.

There was no doubt that their unknown victim was dead. Possibly, he or she had still been alive on leaving the apartment, but the sheer amount of blood indicated injuries that would have been fatal anywhere outside of an emergency room. And whoever had beaten the victim had obviously not been intending to make the ER his next stop.

Sara adjusted the focus and knelt down to take a closer shot of a partial footprint in the blood from the bedroom. Catherine - who was much better versed in blood properties than she was - had tagged the scuff marks as knee-marks from crawling on the first walkthrough, so the shoeprint must belong to their killer.

For a moment, she lowered the camera and it hung from her neck. She felt her gorge rising again, briefly, as she drew her attention back to senses other than vision and the copper scent filled her nostrils. It brought back memories of the Collins murder, and young Brenda. Grissom would be unhappy, but Sara resolved at that moment to check up on the girl at the earliest opportunity. She had been remanded to state custody after her young mother had been sent to jail, but after that, Sara had been distracted and Brenda had disappeared into the system.

Shaking herself, Sara stood again and refocused to begin shooting every foot of the room. They would probably do most of the analysis here, but they would need the photos for posterity and for court.

When she reached the ledge over the faux fireplace - there was only a switch beside it to activate the electric flames - she paused for a moment and let the camera fall again to bump against her sternum. "Hey, Cath, take a look at this."

The blonde came up behind her and looked over her shoulder. "Void."

"Yeah. Something was here."

Framed photos were arranged along the ledge; Carter and Bianca in Venice and in Disneyland - copies of the same pictures stuck in Bianca's dressing room mirror - and a half a dozen others, mostly of Bianca or Sam. At least one was of a group of young men and women smiling and giving each other bunny ears, and the printed-on caption read "UNLV Pre-Med Club, Class of '03."

But two of the photos, more toward the back, were only halfway covered in the long dripped line of blood that blanketed all the others. Sara brought up her hands and framed the space with thumbs and index fingers. "I'm thinking it was positioned horizontally. Why would our killer take it?"

"Well, if James is our killer, and this is someone else's blood, maybe he's fled and that's one he wanted to keep with him."

Sara slanted an incredulous gaze at her fellow CSI. "The blood starts in the bedroom - in the bed, even. You don't think it's Carter James's?"

"I won't tell Grissom you said that," Catherine joked. "I'm just playing all the possibilities."

"Okay. So in the possibility that this is James's blood, why would the killer take this picture with him?"

"Maybe it represented the reasons he was being killed."

"Or, maybe he's in the picture." Sara seized on the idea, and continued excitedly. "This is an intimate killing. There's a lot of rage in this room. Whoever did this knew Carter James, and hated him."

"And the even bigger question - is this connected to Bianca's murder, or is this just a bizarre coincidence?"

"Why don't we see what the evidence tells us," Sara said with a grin.

Grissom hung up the phone, and Warrick frowned at the look of complete shock on his supervisor's face. "What?"

"That was Catherine. She and Sara are at James's apartment - we have another crime scene. Apparently it's covered in blood."

Warrick turned that over in his mind for a few seconds. "I'll head over and meet them there as soon as we get back to the lab."

"No." Grissom's abrupt refusal startled him, and he did a double-take. "You're going to see if Sam Tolmen has an alibi."

"He's been at his sister's bedside since he got here," Warrick objected.

"Are you sure?"

The two criminalists looked at each other for a moment, and Warrick was the first to look away as the light changed to green and he was able to turn onto North Trop Boulevard. Silence reigned, and when Warrick pulled into the space, he turned off the car but made no move to unbuckle his seatbelt right away. "I'll call him. We need him to come in anyway to confirm the fiancé's voice on the answering machine. I really don't like him for this, Griss."

"You're letting the human element cloud your judgment. You said yourself that Tolmen hated James." Grissom's face was impassive.

"I did. He does," Warrick confirmed, and slammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel before leaning over to unbuckle his seat belt. "Right. I'll keep you updated."

"Hey, yeah, I'm calling from the Las Vegas Crime Lab," Nick said, taking his feet down from where he'd propped them up on the table. "I was just wondering if I could have a moment of your time to help out in an ongoing criminal investigation."

He'd been on hold for the past twenty minutes, and had used the time to create spiderweb maps of what they knew so far about the case. Victim, suspect, crime scene. Evidence linked to evidence, that led to dead ends or more possible suspects. Bubbles with names inside of them stretching outward, connected by more names, spawning lines to bubbles with pieces of evidence in them in a reciprocal dance.

He would probably throw it all away when he was done, but it was something he liked to do when he had a few spare minutes. It helped order cases in his mind, especially ones that kept twisting.

Nevertheless, twenty minutes was a little bit too long to hear "Seasons in the Sun" replaying over and over again, and his frustration level had risen with each subsequent repeat. So he'd had to stretch to make his tone polite and his words conciliatory when District Manager Charlie Holden finally picked up on his end - but the stretch was worth it. If there was one thing Nick had learned about interacting with the public in an official capacity, it was that they loved to be made to feel like their participation was invaluable, no matter how trivial the lead.

"Of course you may. Vernon Paper Products is glad to be of service to those who keep our beautiful city safe," Holden answered, and Nick mentally tagged him as someone who tended to be above and beyond the normal helpful citizen model.

"I'm glad to hear that," and he tried to keep the dry tone out of his voice. "I'm looking at two examples of florist's sentiment cards that are pieces of evidence, and we've been able to isolate your company's mark on the back. I need to know what stores in town you would have distributed this particular type of card to."

"Could you describe them for me?"

"They're both two inches by three inches, stiff white paper. Both are blank with decorative borders; the first one has a ribbon in blue and gold, and there's a woman in..." Nick squinted "in, uh, a blue dress, sort of looking backward over her shoulder."

"Midnight Renaissance. A very popular design. And the second one?"

"Flowers. Roses, light pink, with a thin gold ribbon; they go along the top and right side of the card. The whole thing's kinda faded."

"Classic Sentiment," Holden identified. "Another very popular design. If you can hold for just a moment, I will be able to call up a list of stores that received deliveries in the past six months."

Nick opened his mouth to beg him to just set the phone down on the desk, but closed it again on a slight moan when "Season in the Sun" began again.

He was intensely grateful when sometime in the middle of the second repetition Vega knocked on the door. "Scott Loring should be arriving in about five minutes."

"I'll meet you there," Nick said, shifting his shoulder so that the detective could see the phone wedged between his chin and shoulder.

Vega nodded and left, and Nick started a new piece of paper with Scott Loring in the middle of it. Line, bubble: "Affair - 2, 3 Days" Line, bubble: "Motive?" Line, bubble: "Dinner." Line, bubble: "Hiding something..."

"Thank you for waiting," Holden's voice inserted itself right after "but the wine, and the song, like the seasons..." and Nick set the pen down and pulled a new sheet of paper over. "I have a list of five shops here in town who placed orders for both those cards within the past six months."

He set the pen down. "If you could fax it, that would be great."

"Of course. Is there anything else you need?" Holden's voice was full of repressed eagerness. No doubt he would go home that night to watch a true crime series on the Discovery Channel and feel proud of himself for greasing the wheels of the Clark County justice system.

"That's all for now. Thank you for your help, Mr. Holden." Nick read off the fax number and hung up the phone, rolling his head to rid himself of the crick in his neck. He slid the papers he had been doodling on into a pile and set off for the interrogation rooms.  



	18. Sign and Semblance Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nick moved to stand next to the other CSI and passed him over a manila folder. "Jacqui lifted one print from the vase. It's smudged, but she's got a partial match to Mallory Smith."

Grissom looked to the side to see Nick entering the observation area, and turned his attention back to where Scott Loring was sitting, clasping and unclasping his hands and looking around the room with wide eyes. A uniformed officer stood at the door, arms crossed in front of his chest, and every so often Scott would look up and wince when his eyes landed on the gun in the officer's holster.

Nick moved to stand next to the other CSI and passed him over a manila folder. "Jacqui lifted one print from the vase. It's smudged, but she's got a partial match to Mallory Smith."

"Why isn't she here?" Grissom asked mildly.

"Vega was going to bring them both in. I don't know why he got to Loring before Smith," Nick said defensively. "I don't think Loring is a suspect - we just need to find out why he lied about having an affair with Bianca Tolmen."

The entomologist nodded slowly. "And the QD results?"

"Tentative handwriting match on both cards, and they were manufactured by the same company. I just got off the phone with their District Manager, and he faxed us a list of florists in Vegas that use the cards. It's in the folder."

Grissom opened the folder and looked at the list, and smiled faintly.

Nick shifted from foot to foot and manfully repressed the urge to ask him what was so funny, in the end deciding that he didn't really want to know.

"I'll call them first thing in the morning. They had to transfer me to the district manager's house to get this information. The shops won't be open for another five hours at the earliest."

Grissom nodded slowly and shut the folder. "Good work, Nicky."

"And now I'm going to go see why Scott Loring lied about having an affair with Bianca Tolmen." For a split second, he wondered if that was why Grissom was here - to interview Scott. It would have been within his rights as a supervisor to lead the interrogation. Nervously, he added, "We've already established something of a working bond."

Grissom rested his chin on his knuckles, and Nick left the room, circling around to enter the interrogation room and reflecting on the fact that the charged air of the interrogation room was somehow less intimidating than sharing space with Grissom had been.

"Nick. Hey." Scott sat up with a painfully trusting smile on his face. "I don't get it, I thought I answered all your questions?"

Vega entered the room and took up a position behind Nick, shifting his weight to lean his shoulder against the wall, eschewing the second seat next to the CSI.

"We just have a few more," Nick said, and opened up a second manila folder, sliding two sheets of paper out so that Scott could see them. "These are DNA test results. You see these bars here? They're what we call markers. There are thirteen of them. The paper on the right is from a sample that was collected from Bianca's apartment - seminal fluid from her bedsheets, actually. It's about two days old." Nick tapped the other sheet. "This one here is the sample you gave us the other day."

Scott looked between the two papers and then back up at Nick. "They match."

Nick didn't confirm the obvious. "Help me out here, Scott. Why didn't you tell us you were sleeping with Bianca?"

He flushed a deep red, equal parts anger and embarassment. "We weren't sleeping together. We...there was one night, and..." He clamped his lips shut. "Do I need a lawyer?"

"Do you think you need a lawyer?" Nick parried gently. The more he talked to Scott, the more he became convinced that the gentle actor would have nothing to do with a murder that had required planning and vicious hatred.

"I didn't do anything!" he blurted out. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Bianca and me. I thought, she was dead, there was no need to...to smear her reputation like that. She had a fiancé. It was just once, though. She was so...I was lonely, and..."

For a second, Nick was deathly afraid that Scott would start to cry. He leaned back, well out of the younger man's personal space, his posture an easy and comforting one. "Hey, man, I understand. It just would've been better if you'd told us right away."

"I didn't know you could do things like this...DNA matches..." Scott's fingers twitched on the sheets of paper.

And here, Nick reflected, was Charlie Holden's exact opposite. Scott truly had no clue about what forensic science could do. In Nick's mind, that made him even less of a likely suspect, but Grissom was watching from the other side of the two-way mirror, and Grissom would be hasty to remind Nick, just as Erin had, that Scott acted for a living.

"Did anyone else know about this?"

Scott shook his head vehemently. "No. No one. Not even my sister. Bianca and I agreed we needed to pretend like nothing had happened. She didn't want Carter to be angry with her, and I didn't want him to be angry with her either."

"Okay," Nick reassured, chalking up another mark against Carter James.

"Is there anything else you left out of your initial statement?" Vega asked from behind Nick, and Scott jerked his head up to look at the detective.

"I thought you were calling me here because of Bianca's cell phone," he said, and his hand came up from his jacket pocket to set the object on the table. "She left it in my car that night. I found it when I was driving home, and for a second I thought I would just give it back to her at the next performance, but..." He pressed his lips into a thin line and looked away even as he pushed the small phone across the table toward Nick.

Pulling a latex glove out of his pocket, Nick picked up the phone and noted that it was turned off - though whether that was because the batteries had died or because Bianca had turned it off when she'd left it in the car, he had no idea. It would be something to add to his spider web sketches.

"Thanks, Scott. Is that all?"

"That's everything. I swear. I would never hurt Bianca, she was a friend. And if I did anything stupid like that, no one would take care of my sister. She's sick, she needs me to look after her." Scott's eyes were shining now. "I'd never just abandon her like that."

Actor, Nick reminded himself. "You're free to go, then. You'll just need to sign a new statement - one with all the details this time."

"I will. I'm really sorry." He bobbed his head, and Nick had flashbacks to the Lab puppy he'd had as a child - all overgrown limbs and limpid brown eyes that swore eternal innocence.

Then again, they'd sworn eternal innocence even as tiny puppy teeth shredded through a prized baseball glove.

Nick nodded to Vega, collected the DNA results, and left the room.

Sara ducked carefully under the thin red string and set the handful of swabs on top of the rapidly growing pile by the door. Catherine was sitting cross-legged in one of the few areas of carpet that didn't have blood on it. Every so often she looked up and squinted and then looked down again to scribble something on the kneeboard that was balanced precariously in her lap.

So far, there was nothing outwardly incriminating besides the blood. Sara had bagged a razor from the bathroom for a DNA comparison to see if this was in fact Carter James's blood, and several stains on the bed sheets had fluoresced as bodily fluids. The footprint in the blood had been photographed and catalogued, every bloodstain had been swabbed and marked and entered into evidence, and still Erin hadn't returned from the downstairs office.

By mutual unspoken agreement, Catherine had concentrated exclusively on the blood spatter. It was, after all, her area of expertise, and Sara was more than willing to leave her to it. While the correct analysis of blood spatter was pure trigonometry, the interpretation of such extensive patterning was best left to someone with experience and a feel for the higher art behind the science.

So, the living room was now criss-crossed with colored strings. It would be some time into the evaluation before Catherine would be willing to make the call on which stain had occurred when, but in the meantime she'd developed her own system of colored strings based on the spread of the drops - there were both medium and low velocity impact sprays, cast-off patterns, and at least one transfer pattern where the victim had stumbled into the wall across from the bedroom door on his way out to the living room. Each type of spatter had its own string, and so far half of the patterns had colored strings stretching outward to designate their directionality.

"It's hard to believe no one heard this," Sara commented to the air, not really expecting Catherine to hear her.

"We'll have to ask Levinson when he gets back. But in a housing complex like this, it's mostly working professionals - depending on when it was done, they may not have been home," Catherine replied absently, and twisted her wrist around to add in another detail on the piece of paper before looking up and squinting across the room. "And never be surprised by what people are willing to ignore as long as it doesn't directly interfere with their day to day life."

Even though she knew it was true, Sara ground her teeth in frustration. Careful to avoid the splotches, she made her way across the carpet to where Catherine was sitting and looked over her shoulder at the diagram and number crunching. For a few minutes, she watched in silence over the curve of the other woman's hunched shoulder, studying the notations and looking up to see which spots of the room they corresponded to.

"Cath? Sara?" Erin stood at the door, and Sara made her way back across the carpet and around the couch to meet her.

"Any news?"

"Some." The detective held up a paper bag. "Tapes from the surveillance camera that monitors the entryway, two days' worth. I also interviewed our friend Mark downstairs - he only works the night shift, and he hasn't seen James for some time, but that's not unusual. I've got the name and address of the day shift and swing shift doormen, and I'll talk to them next."

"But as of now, we have no time of death," Sara followed her thought. "Until we know when he died, he's still a suspect in Bianca's murder."

"Without even a body, that's going to have to come down to outside factors," Catherine chimed in from the other side of the couch. "Pull phone records, credit card and bank records, anything that would give us a clue as to when this happened."

"There was a laptop in the office," Sara said. "I'll see what information I can get out of it."

"Aside from that, nothing remarkable. Paid his rent on time, never any noise complaints. Most interesting thing on his record is that one of the burners on the stove went on the blitz about six months ago and they had to order parts to fix it. He's been in this building for about five years now, since he started at UNLV. Moved into this apartment from a studio two floors down when he graduated.

"There are studios in this building?" Catherine asked in surprise.

"Hey, I'm just reading what I was told," Erin defended, spreading her hands wide, the pages of the steno pad fluttering with the movement. "So anyway, I'm going to go back to PD, start the warrants for the records, and then by that time I figure I'm good to wake up our day shift doorman a little early and keep our swing shift doorman up a little late. I'll keep you posted."

Sara nodded to her and turned back to the apartment. Catherine had begun stringing another pattern, starting just right of the television. It looked like she was almost finished, so Sara ventured a question.

"Any thoughts?"

Catherine was silent until she'd tacked the string to a corner of the couch. "Somehow, our guy gets inside. At some point he had access to the keys, maybe made a copy for himself, maybe already owned a copy." She ducked under the strings to head toward the hallway, and Sara followed her. "He gets his first blow in in the bedroom - head wound, based on the extent and concentration of the blood soaked into the pillow. Obviously, it woke James up. He lurches, comes down on his hands and knees; probably took the assasilant by surprise. Perp spins - " her hand gesture took in the line of blood against the wall on the other side of the bed - and James crawls out, moving quickly, sloppily. Manages to get himself to his feet." They exited the bedroom and were face to face with bloody handprints on the wall across the hall. "Glances off this wall, turns, heads for the living room. This is where it gets complicated."

They took the few steps and stood with a clear view of the living room. "We've got at least five different patterns in here, with five different origins and directionality vectors. He was still moving. Cast-off pattern along the mantelpiece, the couch, and the TV. Transfer patterns on the rug, the couch, and the wall next to the TV. And at some point he got his hands on the doorknob. I can see it happening any number of ways, frankly. He was getting the shit beat out of him, and he was fighting for his life. He kept moving, kept trying to dodge, but he probably had a concussion after the first head wound. He never really had a chance."

Sara shivered. "Weapon?"

"Something blunt, possibly lengthy; he swung it four times. Baseball bat, pipe, anything like that. I would say fire poker, but they're all still there and the blood pattern shows they haven't been disturbed." Catherine shook her head. "It takes a lot of hatred to do that to someone."

"I wonder if Sam Tolmen has a solid alibi," Sara thought aloud.

"Sam, over here."

The young man spun from where he had been studying the Officer of the Month plaques, and smiled when he saw Warrick. "Hey. I got your call."

"Thanks for coming in." Warrick shifted uncomfortably. "Why don't you have a seat?"

Sam looked at him oddly, but sat down on the black plastic seats in the hallway. The CSI joined him a second later, taking the seat next to him.

"Listen, Sam..." Warrick trailed off, and looked down at his hands. "Two of our CSIs went over to Carter James's apartment earlier, and they found blood. Lots of it. There's no body, but we're working from the assumption that he's been murdered."

Sam twisted in the seat to stare at the CSI. "You think I did it."

"It's not what I think that counts," Warrick rebutted. "You told me yourself that there had been...difficulties."

"I don't believe this," Sam spat out, and stood up to whirl on him. "I just got here this morning, and you've got me leaving my dying sister's bedside to kill her fiancé?"

"I'm not saying anything," Warrick returned, and stood himself, gripping Sam's arm just above the elbow. His outburst had attracted attention. "Calm down. If you didn't leave Bianca, then you're all set. I'm just warning you, man. They're going to be questioning you."

Sam jerked his arm from the other man's grip. "Whatever. I thought you were cool."

"It's not my job to be cool," and Warrick's voice was hard. "I need you to verify the answering machine messages. Are you still willing to do that?"

But Sam seemed unwilling to let it go. "I'll do whatever it takes to find who killed my sister. And yes, I think it was Carter, and yes, I want the bastard dead. But I didn't do it. I wouldn't."

"Just as long as you have that alibi," Warrick reassured him. "Let's go listen to those tapes now."

Archie was busy with the surveillance tape from a convenience store robbery when they entered, but Warrick was familiar with the A/V equipment, and the tech waved him toward the corner of the room with the tape player. The CSI cued up the tape, and looked at Sam to make sure he was ready. At his nod, he pressed play.

"Bianca, hey, it's me. Just wondering where you were."

"That's him," Sam said immediately.

"Let's play a few more, just to be sure," Warrick cautioned.

"Bianca...uhm...still wondering. Give me a call when you get this."

"Okay, this is starting to get weird. Why aren't you picking up?"

"Where the hell are you, Bianca? You're not answering at the theater, you're not answering your home phone. Why are you avoiding me?"

Sensing the tension in the younger man beside him, Warrick pressed the stop button after that.

"I'm still sure. It's him."

Vega rapped at the door. "We're ready for you now, Warrick. Mr. Tolmen," he acknowledged, with a cool nod of his head.

The interrogation room was just like any other, but the instant they crossed the threshold, Sam's entire demeanor changed. He looked at Warrick suspiciously, fidgeted, tensed his muscles and hunched his shoulders.

"Why don't you walk us through your activities form the time you arrived in Vegas," the detective prompted, as Warrick leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He didn't have the heart to take the lead in this interview.

"I got here around eight in the morning, from Reno. Red-eye flight, as early as I could catch it." Sam drummed his fingers on the table.

"Flight number?"

"I don't remember. I've got the ticket in my bag at the hotel, though."

"We'll want to see it later."

Sam stared blankly. "Fine. I got off the plane, got into a taxi, went to the hospital. I was there until...until Bianca died, and then your CSI friend here took me to a hotel. I checked in, put my stuff away, went out for dinner, went to bed. Got woken up about an hour ago, and now I'm here."

"Is anyone able to vouch for your presence at the hospital?"

"Sure. I guess. I don't know. I mean, I was there all day. Nurses checked in and stuff. I went downstairs to eat lunch, but I was only gone for twenty minutes. I may have gone to the bathroom once or twice, too. I don't really remember. Ask them." Now he was openly hostile.

"And after you checked in?"

"Like I said, I went out to dinner."

"Where?"

Sam huffed in frustration. "Some diner."

"How did you pay? Credit card? Remember your waitress's name?"

"What's with all the questions?"

"We're trying to help you out," Warrick finally joined in. "Give us someone who can corroborate your story."

"I paid by credit card, actually," Sam relented. "My waitress was Wanda. Tall, redhead. White shirt, blue apron."

"Okay." Vega nodded. "Is there anything else that you haven't told us?"

"Yeah, you want to know what I had for dinner?"

Investigators and suspect stared at each other across the table, and Sam broke the eye contact first.

"We'll be in touch," Vega said, and Warrick watched sadly as Sam stood quickly, the chair grating against the floor, and tossed look of thorough betrayal in Warrick's direction before stalking out of the room.  



	19. Sign and Semblance Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Whatever it takes to prove to you that I had nothing to do with this."

"Thanks for coming, Ms. Smith," Brass offered as the woman sat down on the chair across the interrogation table with no visible signs of relaxation, holding her muscles taut and her hands clasped together just above the table.

"Whatever it takes to prove to you that I had nothing to do with this."

Nick smiled beatifically. "Then maybe you can clear up why your fingerprint was found on a vase in Ms. Tolmen's dressing room."

"What?" The question seemed to have taken her completely by surprise. "You dragged me all the way down here to ask me that?"

"Just answer the question, Ms. Smith," Brass said.

"I don't see why it's a big deal."

"Why don't you tell us what happened?" Nick asked, doing his best to be soothing.

"The roses. Right. Okay, fine." She blew an exasperated huff out through her lips. "It was right before the big wedding scene. I remembered at the last minute that I'd left my garland down in the box office."

"Kind of an odd place for you to leave something that important," Brass pointed out.

"Yeah, well, I was down there before the show started, making sure some tickets I'd had reserved were still there. Friends were in from out of town. I put it down and didn't realize I'd left it there until right before the wedding scene. I remembered, ran down, and grabbed the garland." Mallory sat back and crossed her arms.

"And?"

"There was a guy standing just inside the lobby, next to the first box office window. He looked really confused, so I asked him what he was doing. He showed me the roses - gorgeous flowers, probably cost the sucker a fortune - and he said he needed them delivered to one of the actors."

"And that didn't strike you as odd?" Brass asked incredulously.

"I've seen odder." Mallory shrugged fluidly. "It's theater. It attracts the crazies."

"So what did you do?"

"I told him I'd take them up and put them on Bianca's dressing table. I did so. I don't see why this is such a big deal."

"What did he look like?"

"Tall. Blond. Built. Very built...and preppy. Khakis, polo shirt, nice leather jacket." She rubbed her chin absentmindedly and for a moment it seemed like she was smiling at the memory. "Kinda nervous-looking, too."

"Did he look like someone who would be delivering flowers?"

"I have no idea what that's supposed to look like," she snapped out, and Nick had to concede the point.

"And there's nothing else you're leaving out?" he prodded, and received a glare in return.

"No. Nothing. Look, I was just trying to do the decent thing, y'know? If I'd known it would get me hauled to the police station in the middle of the night, I would've told him to come back when the show was over." Her arms tightened where they were crossed against her chest, and she set her jaw obstinately.

"No one hauled you anywhere, Ms. Smith," Brass pointed out. "You came here of your own free will."

"Only because I know you already think I have something to do with this, because I was Bianca's understudy. And I didn't. I just wanted to prove it."

"O-kay," Brass said, clearly exasperated. "You can go."

"Not just yet," Nick said, holding a hand up. "Have you ever heard of strychnine?"

Her face was completely blank. "No. What is it?"

"Poison. It was found on the roses, and it's what killed Bianca Tolmen."

She stared. "No way. I was right next to them. I carried them up to her room!" Panic began to show in her face, and her eyes grew wide. "How poisonous is the stuff?"

"Very," Brass said, and seemed to take no small amount of glee in it.

"But you would have exhibited symptoms at the same time as Bianca," Nick interjected quickly to forestall the rising panick attack with an upheld hand. "You'll be fine."

Her features still told them that she was by no means recovered from her near-death brush. "You're sure?"

"Very."

She seemed to relax, marginally. "Can I go now?"

Brass drummed his fingers on the table and looked sideways at Nick, who shrugged. He had no objections. "Sure."

She stood up and glided from the room, dancer's training evident in the flow of muscles, and despite himself, Nick couldn't help watching the way she moved.

"It's almost too good a story to be true," he finally commented once the door had shut and the officer had followed Mallory out.

"Yeah," Brass said. "Convincing little panic there about the strychnine."

"I think it was real," Nick admitted. "There was too much terror for it to be fake."

"Maybe." Brass rubbed his chin with his hand. "Maybe. We'll have to check with the florist's and see if they made any deliveries to the theater that night."

Nick checked his watch. Eight in the morning. "I've got the list - I'll tackle that next."

"Willows." Catherine balanced the box of evidence against her hip as she answered the cell phone on her way out of the apartment building.

"Catherine. How are you coming in processing James's apartment?" Grissom's voice reached her ear just as she squinted her eyes against the morning sunlight.

"Loading up the Tahoe now," she told him. "We've got the initial blood spatter analysis, blood swabs, DNA comparison pieces, some stained bed sheets, and Sara's getting the laptop now to go over at the lab. Some bloody footprints, fingerprints, the works. Nothing that jumps out, unfortunately. Conroy already brought the surveillance tapes back to the lab?"

"She did," Grissom confirmed. "I was just going to have Warrick start on them. I think I have the rest of your puzzle, though."

"I wasn't aware we were missing a piece," Catherine asked, momentarily confused.

"The body, perhaps?"

She wasn't sure that counted as part of the puzzle, but she was shocked enough to set the box down with a thud and turn her attention to the cell phone. "They found him?"

"That's what we need to go find out. Caucasian male, early twenties, badly beaten. Found a few miles outside of town off a hiking trail. I'll need either you or Sara to meet me at the dump site." There was something in his voice that would have told her, even if she hadn't been aware of their relationship, that it was really Sara he wanted to join him.

"Sara," she said instantly. "Lindsey will be getting up for school soon, and I've got some kind of parent-teacher conference at ten."

"That's fine then." She could tell how carefully he was trying to keep his tone neutral, but she had known him for nearly fifteen years now. She let him keep his illusions.

"Give me the directions, and I'll send her as soon as we drop all this back off at the lab."

She was scribbling down the last of the directions from memory - he'd hung up a few seconds earlier - when Sara came up behind her, carrying another evidence box with the laptop and disks she'd found in the study, as well as a few other personal items that might give them a clue as to James's movements over the past few days; agenda, notes, bills, and other random pieces of a life left behind. "What's up?"

"Grissom," Catherine replied dryly. "We've got a DB that might be Carter James. As soon as we get back to the lab and drop this off, you're to go meet him at the dump site. Directions," she added, and passed the slip over to Sara after the other woman set the evidence box down next to its twin in the back of the Tahoe.

A flush of pleasure crept up Sara's cheek as she accepted the scribbled directions, and she smiled. "Sweet. If it's James, maybe we can get a better idea of time of death and whatever weapon was used."

Catherine barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes, keeping her tongue firmly in cheek as she shut the back of the Tahoe. "Whatever turns you on." The flush turned crimson, and Sara ducked her head away. Catherine didn't hold back the snort this time, and rounded to the driver's seat. "C'mon. I need to get home to wake Lindsey up, and you have a date over a DB."

"That has got to be one of the worst jobs out there," Archie commented as they watched Mark the doorman bored in fast-forward. He shifted, checked his watch, leaned against the side of the entryway, shifted again, stuck his hands in and out of his pockets, and repeated those tiny gestures ad nauseam.

"I dunno," Warrick said with a shrug. "I bet it pays well."

"Enough to make up for being mind-numbingly tedious?" Archie snorted. "No way."

With quick reflexes, he flicked the tape back to real time as someone else appeared onscreen in the entryway. He froze the shot, zoomed in - it wasn't James. Another flick brought them back to fast forward.

"And this isn't tedious?"

The lab tech tipped his head back and forth in a so-so gesture. "It can be. But there's an end in sight. And no two cases are ever exactly the same." The tape slowed to real-time again, zoomed in again. Not James.

"I'm starting to think we needed more than two days' of tapes," Warrick said idly, and rested his chin on his hands where they were crossed over the back of the chair.

Mark was replaced by the day shift door man. Fast-forward, pause, zoom in.

"That's him," Archie said, bringing the copy of a picture they'd taken from Bianca's dressing room next to the screen to compare.

"Damn. Timestamp reads...1858 the day Bianca was killed. Now we need to see if he left again." Warrick noted the time down and Archie set the tape in fast forward once again.

Two hours later, they reached the section of the tape that showed Catherine, Sara, and Erin crowding into the small entryway, and CSI and lab tech held back a snicker at the awkward little dance they performed.

"That gives us about thirty hour window." He noted down the timestamp for the time Cath and Sara had arrived - 0057. "That's pretty good. Okay, now we need still shots of everyone who entered and exited during that time."

In the end, they came up with a total of thirty-seven individuals who had entered and exited during that time frame, some of them more than once. Three of them had their faces obscured. They weren't James - that much was evident from posture and body type - but their faces weren't visible for any number of reasons.

"How much detail can you get me on that one?" the CSI asked, tapping the screen that was currently displaying a slight young man in a baseball cap who had entered at about 0917 the day after Bianca was killed."

"I'm not promising anything," Archie warned, but the image on the screen lurched as he zoomed in, and bars began to clean up the focus. It lurched again so that the man's face and cap were filling the entire screen, the bars swept repeatedly, clearing away digital garbage and painstakingly restoring the image pixel by pixel.

Eventually, they were able to read the embroidered lettering on the cap.

"Elton Software Solutions," Warrick read out loud, and wrote it down. It wasn't a company he was familiar with. "And when did he leave again?"

The screen shifted and moved into fast-forward; the young man in the cap had been one of the ones they'd tagged as entering and exiting. When they once again saw the familiar cap and slight build, the timestamp read 0952.

"Half an hour or so," Archie supplied. "Would that be long enough?"

"Depends on what Catherine and Sara have to tell us. Let's track the others."

"The others" turned out to be a man and a woman. Her face was identifiable on her way out; she'd entered at 2246 the night Bianca was killed wearing a stylish hat and evening gown and exited at 0712 the next morning dressed in a business suit. His face was still obscured, and when they zoomed in, Warrick noted that he was wearing a leather jacket and broad-rimmed cowboy hat, and had a muscular, powerful build. He entered at 0037 and exited at 0807 dressed in different clothes but still wearing the cowboy hat.

Next, they moved on and sorted out the people whose faces had been identifiable, and who had entered but hadn't exited. It was possible that they'd left by a utility exit or some other back door, and since they knew the body had been dumped outside of town, it made sense that their killer hadn't just walked out the front door with a bloody corpse.

That left them with four options; two women and two men.

"Next step is to run these by the apartment manager and find out how many of them actually live in the building. Thanks for your help, Archie," Warrick said, clapping the lab tech on the shoulder and collecting the printed images.

"Anytime."  



	20. Sign and Semblance Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Hi, this is Nick Stokes calling from the Las Vegas Police Department. I just need to ask a few questions about deliveries made the evening of the twenty-fourth to the Las Vegas Repertory Theater." He leaned back in the chair and stared up at the ceiling. This was the sixth florist he'd called that morning, and the only difference so far had been in the level of alertness in each of the clerks.

"D'Angelo's Florists," said the bored voice on the other end of the line.

"Hi, this is Nick Stokes calling from the Las Vegas Police Department. I just need to ask a few questions about deliveries made the evening of the twenty-fourth to the Las Vegas Repertory Theater." He leaned back in the chair and stared up at the ceiling. This was the sixth florist he'd called that morning, and the only difference so far had been in the level of alertness in each of the clerks.

"I'm sorry, but information on our clients' purchases is confidential," the clerk sniffed.

"Right." Nick rolled his eyes at the crack in the ceiling. "Look, I can be there in about a half an hour with a warrant, or we can make this easier on both of us and you can just give me the information."

Two lab techs passed by the niche Nick was in, discussing the results of some test, heads bent close together over a LVPD folder in discussion. A phone rang in the distance. Someone laughed throatily.

"If you'll give me just a few minutes to call that information up," the clerk finally said.

"Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated," Nick replied, and was glad he was talking over the phone instead of in person. The smirk forming on his lips wouldn't be very PR friendly.

At least, there was a smirk forming until the clerk put him on hold and "You Light Up My Life" began playing.

He pulled the receiver away from his ear and stared at it in horror for a few seconds, finally settling for holding it away from his head. He could still hear faint strains of the music, but it was no longer quite so jarring.

It had started somewhere in the middle of the first chorus, and ran through to the end and then started again on the first few bars before the clerk picked up the phone on his end again.

"I'm sorry, I have no deliveries for the Las Vegas Reperetory Theater for that evening," the man informed him primly.

"Right." Nick ground his teeth in frustration. "Thank you for your help."

The clerk hung up without even a goodbye.

The next two florists were also a bust, and that exhausted his list. He was resting, head in hand, glaring at the list, when Erin Conroy knocked on the table next to him to get his attention, startling out of his haze.

"They told me you were calling florists." He just stared at her. "Anyway, I figured you might be going about it the hard way." A manila folder dropped down in front of him, narrowly missing his nose. "Carter James's credit card records. Look at the night of the twenty-fourth."

He sat up abruptly and opened the folder. "Two dozen red roses, D'Angelo's Florists." That fit with what Mallory had told them - that the man delivering the flowers hadn't been a delivery man. "I wonder what Carter James looks like?"

"Keep looking."

Nick flipped over the credit card statements and saw a color copy of a 4"x6" photo of Bianca Tolmen wearing Mickey Mouse ears, standing next to a young man - blond, built, wearing a polo shirt and slacks. Mallory Smith's description had been perfect.

"I think we may have just cracked this case wide open," he said with a grin, and when he looked up, Erin was smiling back at him.

The hiking trail that Sara's directions led her to was a good half hour outside of Vegas proper, and she had to pull the Tahoe off-road to park behind the other Tahoe that Grissom had driven to the scene, which was in turn parked behind a police cruiser, its red and blue lights flashing silently in the pre-dawn. Sara followed the trail just ahead of the cruiser, keeping her flashlight trained on the ground in front of her as she made note of the scuffs that lead to the crime scene. The tracks had been hopelessly compromised, first by the hikers who had discovered the body, then by the park ranger who had been called in, and finally by the officer who had responded to the 419 page.

Though it amused her to no end that alongside the trail she saw careful methodical steps and recognized the tread from Grissom's shoes.

The body was in an area remarkably similar to where Kaye Shelton's had been dumped, though they were on the other side of Vegas, and Sara had to pause for a moment on the crest of the hill and swallow hard against the memories. They would revisit in dreams during the day, of that she was sure, but for now they would have to be tucked away deep inside.

Halfway down the hill, something caught her eyes, and she veered right, shining her flashlight into the bushes. There it was again - a slight movement. She knelt down and stuck her flashlight between her teeth, grimacing at the metallic taste, manipulating the beam with her lips as she balanced on one hand and pushed aside the bushes with the other.

Hiding under the tumbleweed and covered in dust were charred remains of clothing; a few scraps of denim, and a slightly larger piece of tan material. Tan material with a dark brown stain on it - blood. Sara pushed her face as close as she dared, spreading the bushes aside, but couldn't see any further. Either way, it was quickly apparent to her that the fire hadn't burned here. The remnants had been jumbled into a pile, and if there had been flames anywhere near the tumbleweed, dry and cracked from the summer heat, it too would have gone up in flames.

Squirming backwards, she stood up and wiped the dust from her black jeans and then took the flashlight out of her mouth and tucked it back into her belt in order to free both her hands to reach into her evidence kit and pull out her camera. Sliding the evidence card as close to the bush as she could still get it and keep the number visible, she photographed repeatedly and then set the camera aside.

With tweezers, she was able to separate three small pieces of denim, the largest the size of her palm. The tan fabric hadn't burned as easily for whatever reason - it was flimsier than the denim, and so in theory would have burned faster. Perhaps it had been rolled inside the jeans? The creases in the fabric certainly seemed to indicate so. Working carefully to make sure the larger piece - about a six by eight inch flap, charred at the edges - didn't snag on the bush, she bagged it. After that there were four smaller pieces of tan fabric, all equally splashed with brown, the smallest of which was still larger than the biggest piece of denim.

When that was finished, she gathered up the ash - or as much ash as was left. The movement that had originally caught her eye had been the tan fabric flapping in the breeze that had begun to idly scatter the white motes to the winds. Fully half of the bag would probably be eliminated as the sand of the desert and Sara bagged an exemplar of that, too. Once the area was clear, her suspicions were confirmed: there were no scorch marks on the cracked ground or the few rocks that were exposed to the elements.

"Sara! What are you doing up there?" Grissom's voice was irritated, and she rolled her eyes while her back was still to him.

"Evidence," she sing-songed back, knowing that a playful stance would likely dissipate his bad mood, and even if it increased his temper, she would still be amused. "Some charred pieces of clothing under this bush. Covered in blood. I'm thinking the perp tried to burn the evidence."

"Oh," he huffed as she continued precariously down the slope, and his arm jerked out involuntarily as she slid slightly more than she'd intended and careened wildly to regain her balance. She didn't take his hand, but smiled at him gratefully for offering it.

"Where's the body?"

"Down here," he said, and she followed him down to a hollow underneath a jutting rock where flies were humming busily. She winced, and it was his turn to be playful. "They're having quite the party."

"Yeah," she said with a grimace, swatting with a free hand. "How long have they been having their party?"

"I'll need to bring samples back to the lab, but at first guess, no longer than twenty-four hours." Grissom knelt down by the body, and Sara followed suit.

The face was wedged into the ground, but at first glance, the injuries the corpse had sustained prior to death seemed consistent with the amount of blood on the walls of Carter James's apartment. The flies were feasting at any of a dozen open wounds on the back alone, and the victim's clothing had been soaked clear through and looked to have crusted through as well from the sheer amount of blood.

She reached a gloved hand down and slid the shirt up a few inches. "Lividity," she observed, and pressed a finger against the dark skin closest to the ground. "Fixed, too." The skin had not paled where she'd pushed against it.

"But he was moved," Grissom pointed out, and touched his finger a few inches up from where she had just pressed, indicating a reddish stain that covered most of the lower back. "At some point, he was lying on his back."

Sara thought back to the pool of blood on the apartment floor, where Catherine had extrapolated that Carter James had died, and nodded in agreement. She didn't bring the coincidence up, however, knowing Grissom would prefer to keep all prior assumptions about the victim's identity out of the picture for now.

Irritably, she swung at another fly as it buzzed past her ear. "Still never get used to this part."

It was an old argument, and a rhetorical statement, one he merely grunted in response to as they both stood up. They knew each other well enough to know that Grissom would already have tended to the routine of evidence gathering as well as to the initial insect collection in the forty-five minutes it had taken Sara to return to the labs and log in the evidence from James's apartment.

They both stood a few feet off from the body and Grissom motioned for David to come in with the gurney to collect the body. Grissom looked on anxiously as the experienced coroner rolled the body and, with the assistance of an orderly, hefted it onto the gurney. Sara tiptoed forward and looked carefully at the victim's insect-ravaged face.

"That's Carter James," she confirmed, remembering the smiling young man from the pictures on his mantelpiece and from the photographs stuck into Bianca Tolmen's dressing table mirror. "There goes our best suspect."

"Not necessarily," Grissom chided. "We need to pinpoint time of death a little closer. Warrick was working on the security tapes, and Nick was tracking down florist shops. He's still a viable suspect for Bianca's murder. The question becomes, was his own murder related to hers?"

"Revenge or serendipity?" Sara wondered aloud.

"The PD are working on cracking Sam Tolmen's alibi as we speak. We'll know soon enough."

"Well, if it's not related, this case just got a whole lot more complicated." Sara pulled out her flashlight again. "You want perimeter or resting place?"

"Elton Software Systems," Warrick muttered to himself as he thumbed through the yellow pages, his finger coming to rest on the line with the appropriate number. They were located out of Reno. He frowned slightly in memory as he reached across for the phone and dialed.

"Elton Software Systems," the crisp voice on the other end of the line said. The first ring hadn't even finished yet.

"This is Warrick Brown, Las Vegas Crime Lab," he said, leaning back in the chair. "I'm going to need to speak to someone in human resources."

"One moment please."

Strains of a symphony Grissom would have been able to identify played for about thirty second, and then with a click, another voice spoke into the phone. "Maureen Reynolds, Human Resources Manager. What can I do for you?"

"I just need a few minutes of your time to help with an ongoing criminal investigation, Ms. Reynolds," he said, keeping his tone just this side of ingratiating.

"I should warn you, we will not release any employee records without a warrant," Maureen returned, her tone still light and pleasant.

"No more than I expected," he answered in the same tone. "No, for right now, I just need to know who in your company would have access to a baseball cap with your company's logo stitched on it."

"What color was the stitching?"

He narrowed his eyes in surprise. "What?"

"What color was the stitching?" she repeated patiently. "We re-issue baseball caps with the company logo each fall to all new employees at the company picnic. There's a five-year color rotation. If you can tell me what color the stitching on the cap in question is, I can give you a year."

Warrick shuffled through his pictures until he came to the one of the slight young man. "I'm working from a black and white screen capture, so I can't give you much, but it's definitely lighter. White, or a light color."

"This fall's color was silver, and three years ago was white," she supplied. "The other three colors are red, blue, and green, all darker. I don't think they'd look light in a black and white photograph."

"So I'm looking for someone hired either this fall or three years ago?" He tapped the photograph idly.

"Or six or nine falls ago. Like I said, we're on a five-year rotation."

"No, this cap is well-worn, but it's definitely newer than six years. Thank you for your help."

"Is there anything else I can help you with today, Mr. Brown?"

"Ah - yes, just one last thing." He yanked the receiver back from its journey back to the cradle to be hung up. "This is an embarassing question, but what does your company do?"

"We're contracted to develop new computer and video game gambling software for several of Las Vegas's largest casinos," Maureen stated, and the phrase had the well-polished feel of a company line. "I can mail you some brochures if you like."

A chill settled deep in his gut as he stared at the young man in the picture. "No - no, thank you, you've been extremely helpful."

"Elton Software Systems is always glad to contribute to the community," she said, and once again Warrick recognized the ring of a company line. "If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us again."

"I won't," he reassured her, and set the phone down, staring at it for a few seconds before picking it up again and dialing.

"Conroy," the voice on the other end breezed.

"Hey," he said, and leaned back and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Just wondering where you were on Sam Tolmen's alibi."

"Quite the coincidence, Warrick," she teased. "I'm in the hospital parking lot right now. The nurse who checked on Bianca at nine-thirty, ten o'clock, and ten-thirty AM yesterday was able to recall that she didn't see Sam during any of those check-ups."  



	21. Sign and Semblance Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I remember that," Catherine said behind him, and he jumped, sending the scroll careening wildly. Heart racing, he clicked again to stop it.

Nick scrolled through yet another email newsletter from Desert Palms hospital, announcing the re-dedication of the children's cancer ward in the name of Sam Braun, who had donated several million dollars to update all the equipment and refurbish the playroom.

"I remember that," Catherine said behind him, and he jumped, sending the scroll careening wildly. Heart racing, he clicked again to stop it.

"Dammit, Cath, don't sneak up on me like that," he snapped, and then smiled up at her to take the sting out of his words. She returned it, resting a hand on her shoulder as she leaned forward and scrolled back up to where he'd left off.

"I brought Lindsey, and she played with a little girl who had leukemia." Catherine looked away from the screen abruptly and straightened. "She died a week later." They were both quiet for a few minutes, and then she seemed to shake herself. "So, anything new in the case?"

"Oh, yeah. How'd the parent-teacher conference go, by the way?"

"Could've gone better," she shrugged. "Could've gone a whole lot worse, too. Lindsey's not turning in some of her homework assignments."

"Looks like she's inherited your love of paperwork," Nick quipped, and ducked under her glare. "Anyway, the case. The roses that were used to poison Bianca were ordered that afternoon by Carter James, and the man who delivered them to the theater fits James's description. Mallory Smith - who took the roses from the front door to the dressing room - claims not to have any idea what strychnine is. PD's working on a warrant to search her apartment now. Grissom and Sara are still out with that other body, Warrick's tracking down the people on the surveillance tape from the apartment building."

Catherine seemed to roll the new facts over in her head. "Right. I'm going to start pushing through the evidence from James's apartment. I need to finish the blood spatter analysis and start running the prints Sara lifted."

"I'll let you know if anything particularly interesting comes up with this," and he gestured toward the computer screen, "but so far it's looking like his life was the hospital, his church, and a little bit of his fiancée. Nothing that jumps out."

"Did you check his web browser history?" she suggested.

"Did I what?"

She leaned over him again and took the mouse from his hand, opening Internet Explorer and clicking on History. A new window popped up, and Nick groaned audibly at the long list of websites.

"Thanks, Cath, this is going to take me the rest of the day."

She relinquished control of the mouse and smirked at him. "You're lucky Grissom's at a crime scene. I'll be in the print lab if anyone needs me."

He muttered an acknowledgement and turned back to the browser list, clicking on "Yesterday" and beginning to check the links listed. They seemed to be mostly either medical review sites or bible study message boards by what he could tell of the names. In the folder dated a week ago he found a sub-folder dedicated to the website of the Las Vegas Reperetory Theater. Following the pages visited in that site, it seemed that James had been looking at the showtimes for Much Ado About Nothing. Had he been researching a possible time to drop the flowers off?

But it was the entries of two weeks ago that jumped out in glaring relief. Clicking on the very last day available in the browser's history turned up an extensive listing of webpages describing strychnine.

"Catherine, hey!"

She spun in her tracks at Greg's voice, and saw him gesturing for her to enter the lab. "Yes? Shouldn't you be home?"

"Hey, authorized extra overtime. I'm all for it. Anyway," he continued, "I ran the blood swabs from your apartment. It's all the same person. Then I matched it up against the razor Sara took from the bathroom. It's Carter James's blood."

"Grissom and Sara are out on a hiking trail with a DB that may be the rest of him," Catherine informed the tech, who nodded.

"This much blood, there'd have to be a body somewhere. I've also got the matches to the sawdust Grissom pulled from Ellory's apartment. It's a match to the sawdust found in Bianca's bedsheets."

"Unfortunately, that doesn't give us much. He freely admitted they were having an affair. And Nick's working on evidence that may prove that James was the one who poisoned his fiancée." She shifted her weight and leaned her hip against the lab table as she picked up the two evidence printout sheets and tucked them into the manila folder she was already carrying.

"Oh." He seemed deflated. "But wait, now James is dead? Revenge killing?"

Catherine shrugged. "We don't know yet. We don't even know if they're linked."

"Right." Greg's tone was full of disbelief. "Okay, well, then I'll work on backlog until Grissom and Sara get back from the dump site."

Catherine nodded in acknowledgement and left the lab, continuing down to the evidence lockers, where she checked out the prints Sara had lifted from Carter James's apartment, as well as the photograph of the bloody shoeprint. To be thorough, she also checked out the shoeprint evidence Sara had gathered from the dressing room - if they could match any of them, it might mean that someone from the theater had been involved in the murder.

Pulling up a stool next to Jacqui, who acknowledged her with a silent nod, she settled in for a long monotonous stretch of print checking. It wasn't her favorite thing to do, but she had to admit there was a certain sense of accomplishment in logging the prints and slowly but surely chipping away at the evidence.

Twelve of the prints were eliminated as Bianca Tolmen's, mostly the ones Sara had lifted from the entry area and any surfaces the killer had been likely to touch, perhaps for leverage - coffee table, mantelpiece, nightstand. Still she continued scanning and entering. In between searches, she compared the shoeprint against the examples from the dressing room.

She matched the bloody shoeprint at the same time as AFIS beeped that it had found a match. It seemed someone who wore the same nondescript cheap sneakers had been in both Bianca's dressing room as well as stepped in the blood at Carter James's apartment.

AFIS concurred. One of the fingerprints that Sara had labeled as "Mantelpiece - Living Room" had matched against an anonymous print from the dressing room.

So how did this fit in? Their main suspect right now was Sam Tolmen - and Catherine made a mental note to call Warrick as soon as she had finished to find out how that part of the investigation was progressing. Had he been at the theater within twenty-four hours of Bianca's death, and had then traveled to James's apartment to kill him? Hadn't Warrick said that Sam had only arrived from Reno after being informed of his sister's death?

Still, nothing prevented two people from wearing the same type of shoe and even the same size. They couldn't eliminate Sam from the suspect list until they proved or disproved his alibi. But the class evidence was now beginning to stack up against their likely suspect.

Someone from the theater, then? Bianca had been well loved. Was there anyone among her fellow cast members who would be enraged enough to commit murder? Faces flashed before Catherine's eyes. Richard Ellory, who had been having an affair with the young actress. Colin Amberly, who had given all the impression of a father figure. Scott Loring, who had taken her out to dinner the night she died and had slept with her just a few days before that. Or anyone else that had been interviewed who had been close to Bianca.

"You going to get that?" Jacqui asked, and Catherine blinked and looked over at the fingerprint tech before realizing that the computer she'd been working on was beeping a negative response.

She shook herself and clicked through, picking up the next print. "Sorry about that. Got a little distracted."

"Warrick?"

"Uhmph," was all he could manage, as his throat was currently constricted by the cushion wedged underneath it. Pushing feebly with his arms against the couch, he flopped ungracefully over, and blinked repeatedly to clear his blurry vision. Slowly, Vega's face came into focus.

"Sorry to wake you," the detective said apolgetically.

"No...s'okay..." he mumbled, and rubbed a wide palm across his face, wincing when he touched the sore patch that had been pressed into the rough material of the couch. "What's up?"

"Warrant just came through on Mallory Smith's apartment - thought I'd let you know in case one of you CSI-types wanted to come with."

The cobwebs of sleep weren't fully receded - two hours' sleep, he noticed, give or take a few minutes. It took him a few more seconds of blinking to figure out why exactly they were searching Mallory's apartment. "Right. Okay. Any news on Sam Tolmen?"

"Conroy told me he wasn't at his hotel room, but he was still checked in. He's not a flight risk. It's more than likely he's just out in the city. They're going to keep checking back." The detective offered his hand to Warrick, which the CSI grasped and pulled himself to his feet.

"Give me time to shower and change clothes, and I'm there."

True to his word, he met Vega in the parking lot a short while later, sunglasses on against the late-afternoon light. He kept himself from thinking about Sam's involvement until he pulled down a residential street after Vega in his department Taurus, and then his mind finally began turning over the events of the past few hours.

No matter how much Grissom insisted on following the evidence before all, Warrick could never entirely disregard the human element. He supposed it came from spending too much time around Catherine. And in this case, every instinct he had was screaming at him that Sam had nothing to do with Carter James's death.

But then, there was the evidence. He had no alibi for an hour and a half period during which James could have been killed, and they had strong evidence pointing toward the fact that he had been at the apartment complex during that hour and a half. Had it been enough to kill James - in such a violent way? He'd seen Catherine's crime scene sketches and calculations. And there was the matter of getting rid of the body. The dump site was a half hour's drive away.

The logistics could make sense, but only barely. Had Sam lied when he'd said he didn't have a rental car - or had he been forced to abandon it somewhere, soaked with blood?

He was letting his sympathy for Sam overwhelm him, and in the back of his mind, Griss was shaking his head sadly. The point was, Sam had opportunity and motive to kill Carter James, and there was evidence putting him at the crime scene. End of story.

Warrick had nearly convinced himself of that when he opened the door, pulling his evidence kit out after him.

"What is the meaning of this?" he heard Mallory say. Hers was a ground-level apartment with a small terrace, and it was the terrace that Vega had approached upon noticing that Mallory was standing with a water can in hand, obviously poised to begin watering some marigolds that seemed to be fighting a losing battle against their situation in direct desert sunlight.

Slipping sunglasses on, Warrick decided the most sensible place to be was standing a few paces off while Vega explained that they had a warrant to search her apartment for traces of strychnine.

"Look, I already told you, I don't even know what the stuff is." She crossed her arms tightly; she was wearing spandex exercise clothing, and had obviously just come back from a jog. Doing the calculations in his head, Warrick figured that she would probably be leaving for the theater soon for the night's play. Now that Bianca was gone, she would be playing the role of Hero. "I don't have time for this."

"We won't be long," Vega lied through his teeth.

She set the watering can down and stood, one hand on her hip, looking at them suspiciously, and then relented. "Fine. Do whatever you need. I'll be in the shower."

This was where he needed to step forward. "Ah, if I could just check the bathroom before you get in. Wouldn't want to inconvenience you later." That was another little white lie. His real reason had nothing to do with inconveniencing her and everything to do with making sure she didn't have the opportunity to hide anything incriminating before he was able to search the bathroom. If it had the side benefit of making her life easier, then that was an unintended bonus.

Mallory didn't say anything, just turned and re-entered the apartment via the sliding glass doors. Vega followed her, and Warrick followed him after reassuring himself that there was nowhere on the small patio that she could have hidden strychnine. The apartment complex was a new one, and the walls around the terrace were a ugly poured concrete instead of brick. A quick flexing of his knees into a squat eliminated the possibility that she had taped a package to the bottom fo the plastic table and chairs, and a shake of the table umbrella revealed nothing hidden inside the folds.

She was waiting for him when he entered, and pointed a finger toward a door leading off the main room. It was a small apartment, living room cum dining room with a small kitchen tucked into a far corner and a door next to the one he was now approaching that most likely lead to the bedroom. Obviously the space's appeal lay in the access to the admittedly forgettable terace.

Strychnine was white and didn't take well to dye, so he was able to eliminate most of her makeup cases immediately. Mallory was not given to the more subdued bases that Bianca had been. A quick check of the drawers revealed nothing out of the ordinary, and he shook the box of condoms to be sure there was nothing hiding behind the small circular packages that only filled half of the cardboard box.

Likewise, there was nothing in the shower or the medicine cabinet, and nothing suspended in the back of the toilet.

"Why would I hide something there?" Mallory demanded angrily from the door.

"Just doing my job, ma'am," he reassured her, and set the lid back down.

Vega had already started on the living room/dining room; there weren't many places to hide things, and the warrant wasn't all that extensive. By the time Warrick heard the shower start, he'd moved onto the bedroom, checking through the nightstand and opening the drawers in a cursory search. Nothing. When he met Vega in the kitchen; the detective was holding up a salt shaker.

Warrick shook his head. "No. No one would leave something that poisonous just laying around in an open container like that. Bianca died from inhalation - if the strychnine were in the salt shaker, something as simple as knocking it over and breathing while cleaning it up would kill you."

"Right." Vega shook his head in disbelief and replaced the salt shaker. They searched together in silence, and when the water from the shower stopped, Warrick was examining the final items in a mostly empty trash bag.

"Are you finished now?" Mallory asked coldly, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and towelling off her hair.

"We are. Thank you for your time." Vega stepped forward and gave her a business card. "If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me."

"Oh, I won't," she promised him as she led them to the door.

"Break a leg tonight," Warrick offered in one last gesture of peace as she slammed the door shut in their faces.  



	22. Sign and Semblance Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was almost one o'clock in the afternoon, and the body wouldn't come up for autopsy until night shift started. The day shift and swing shift coroners were notoriously territorial about which bodies they worked on, so Carter James would have to wait for Robbins to slice him open and find out what he could.

Rather embarrassingly, Sara found herself blinking furiously to stay awake on the drive back to the lab. Sometime during her perimeter walk of the crime scene - which had turned up the charred space where the clothes had been burned, but nothing more - the fact that she'd been working for nearly twenty-four hours had sunk in. Once, she wouldn't have given that a second thought, but lately she'd grown entirely too used to a warm bed and the comfortable weight of Grissom's arm, and it hadn't taken her long to come close to an enjoyment of the time she spent sleeping. She would always consider it a waste of time, but now the reality of that wasted time was a good deal more pleasant than it had been.

It was almost one o'clock in the afternoon, and the body wouldn't come up for autopsy until night shift started. The day shift and swing shift coroners were notoriously territorial about which bodies they worked on, so Carter James would have to wait for Robbins to slice him open and find out what he could.

Not that there was much of a mystery about what had killed him, but hopefully the coroner would be able to give them a better approximation of the weapon used, as well as a time frame over which the injuries had been inflicted. Warrick had left Grissom a message about the evidence on the surveillance tapes - could all that damage have been inflicted in just a half an hour, when the complications of transporting the body were added in?

She stifled a yawn with the back of her hand when she opened the back door of the Tahoe and removed her kit and the box of evidence, shutting the door with her shoulder and following Grissom into the building. They split off wordlessly as he handed her the few packets of evidence that he'd kept with him for her to go enter them into the evidence vault. He would need to begin the linear regression right away, but with a body that had only been exposed for twenty-four hours or so, Sara had high hopes that it wouldn't take long and they could go home.

Sure enough, he was deep into his calculations when she re-entered his office and sat down on the couch, watching him silently for a few minutes. He blinked and looked up, and turned his head over his shoulder to smile at her, which she returned. He returned to sticking bugs with pins, and she fished into her bag for the book and continued to read Much Ado About Nothing.

A knock on the doorway jolted her out of a light doze, the book spread open across her chest, and she blinked a few times to see Erin Conroy standing there, yet another manila folder in hand. "Sorry if I'm disturbing anything."

"No, no," Sara reassured, sitting up straight. Grissom was completely lost in thought, measuring and thumbing through reference books. She had a brief moment of worry that he simply hadn't heard the detective knock, but then he looked back over his shoulder and shrugged, obviously expecting Sara to talk to the new woman.

Sara set the book down, careful to place a bookmark in the pages instead of just resting it open on the spine. She'd done that once at home and Grissom's horrified look, while amusing, had quickly disabused her of the habit. Following Erin into the hallway, she shut the office door behind her.

"What's up?"

"Statements from the doormen and other apartment residents, as well as the manager who's on duty during the day." She passed over a signed statement. "His name is Horace Meek. He said that at about nine-thirty yesterday morning a man fitting Sam Tolmen's description knocked on his door, obviously enraged, and demanded to be let in to Carter James's apartment. Said it was a matter of life and death, but he wasn't on the approved list of people that James had indicated at the beginning of the year were allowed entrance to the apartment in case of emergency, so Meek refused. By his best estimate, Tolmen left the office at nine forty-five. That fits in with Warrick's calculations based on the security tape. I also took statements from the across-the-hall neighbors, and they said that they heard someone banging on the door and yelling around the same time. They figured it was private business, so they didn't report it."

"Well, if Tolmen spent at least half of his time in the manager's office, then that leaves us with a pretty narrow window to have killed James in. Did anyone hear anything that could have been the murder?"

"Next-door neighbors to the left heard some 'weird' sounds the previous night just before midnight, but when I questioned them further, they admitted it could just as easily have come from a TV show." Erin shrugged. "Still, it's something to go on."

"Whoever did this was incredibly lucky," Sara observed. "No one reported the noise, and he didn't meet anyone going down the back staircase or out the service entrance."

"That might lend weight to the around midnight thought. There wouldn't have been too many people in the halls, and it would have been dark outside - easy to get the body from the back entrance to whatever vehicle was used to transport."

"The body was resting on a plastic tablecloth," Sara offered. "We found it when the coroner took the body away. I saw similar tablecloths in the linen closet at the apartment, but it could just as easily have been brought to the scene." She paused, considering.

"Also, fax came through for you from the hospital - Bianca Tolmen's medical records." Erin handed over the second sheet in the folder.

Scanning the information quickly, Sara nodded to herself. "The folic acid was first prescribed about a week ago. That would coincide with the time Sam Tolmen told us that his sister called him and told him that James was starting to lose it."

"Do you think she told him, and that's what sent him over the edge?" Erin asked.

"We'll never know. They're both dead. And we'll never know if the baby was his or not. The pregnancy's too early to test accurately for paternity. But judging from the analysis Greg did on the bedsheets, I doubt it was his." She finished scanning the medical records and handed them and the witness statements back to the detective. "Thanks for the update."

"No problem. Go home, get some sleep. You look beat."

Sara made a face at the detective, and returned to the office to find Grissom slipping on his coat. "Are you finished?"

"No," he disillusioned her. "But I'm at a stage where I can take a break for a few hours, and I saw you dozing off. Let's go home and get some sleep."

"Nothing. Zip. Nada."

Nick jumped. "Catherine, you have got to stop sneaking up on me like that."

Her smirk told him she wasn't about to stop anytime soon. "None of the fingerprints - other than Bianca's - matched either AFIS or the prints Sara took from the dressing room. Dead end. We're going to have to wait until the body gets back to see how many of those fingerprints were James's."

"Well, I've got something." He clicked back to the browser he'd left open. "Check out what he was researching."

"If he weren't dead, I'd say we've got a good case," Catherine observed as she clicked through the websites.

"We're sure it was him, then?"

"Oh, yeah. Grissom called me on his way back. Sara made a positive visual ID based on the photos from his apartment." She pulled up a chair and sat next to him, cradling her chin in her hands.

"Well, dead or alive, we have enough evidence to prove that he killed Bianca Tolmen. Warrick called me about five minutes ago. They didn't find any strychnine in Mallory Smith's apartment, and she was the only other person with motive and opportunity to plant the poison. No pun intended."

Catherine rolled her eyes at him, and he grinned charmingly in response.

"Anyway, we know from Mallory's statement, correlated by the timestamp on the credit card report, that James dropped the roses off just before the wedding scene. Mallory put the roses in the dressing room, Bianca entered, took a deep sniff, and at that point it was a foregone conclusion. The poison had entered her system. We can extrapolate that based on where Sara found the roses - stuffed in the trash - that it was after she took a sniff that she read the card and realized it was from her fiancé, and that they were an unwelcome gift."

"But an expensive one," Catherine said wistfully. "Two dozen roses? Very nice."

"Yeah, well." Nick squirmed slightly in his seat. "It's a style. Not all guys are the roses type."

Her smile was suddenly bemused, and she tipped her head to the side, resting her cheek on her knuckles, blonde hair cascading over her hands and brushing the top of the lab table. He was intensely grateful when she didn't push any further. "Go home, get some sleep," she advised him, changing the subject.

"You too," he returned, but was already closing down the laptop, popping out the disk where he had saved the screen caps of the strychnine webpages. "I'm going to drop this off and then I'm gone."

"I'll walk with you and refile these fingerprints, and then I think I'm going home too."

Warrick woke to his alarm, and rubbed a hand over his face blearily. Ten PM - seven hours of sleep that he'd badly needed. After returning to the lab empty-handed, he had found that all the other night shift CSIs had gone home at some point over the afternoon. Brass had caught him on his way home, had updated him briefly on the pertinent details - Sam Tolmen still missing, body initially ID'd as Carter James, evidence of strychnine research on James's laptop - and had, after promising him to call as soon as Tolmen was found, urged him to go home.

It hadn't taken much urging, and Warrick would never be able to swear under oath exactly how he'd managed to get home safely, but he had, and had mustered up barely enough energy to make a quick sandwich that he ate while on his way to bed.

Now, he showered quickly and made coffee and toast, toothbrush sticking out of the corner of his mouth, and took a few minutes to check his email and the day's sports scores before eating and dressing fully.

Catherine was standing guard over the coffee pot when he entered the break room, and she turned to smile at him when he entered and took a seat wearily. Without asking, she poured him a cup, which he took gratefully, nodding his thanks. Nick entered on his second gulp and poured himself a cup, silently offering them each a refill - Catherine declined, Warrick accepted - before sitting down next to Catherine and toying with the handle of his mug for a few seconds, swiveling the ceramic back and forth on the table.

Catherine reached over to stop his movements, and he grinned sheepishly, taking a drink. Warrick leaned back in his chair and took slow, leisurely sips after the gulps of the first cup.

It was a comfortable routine, as they savored the few minutes before shift actually started, enjoying each other's company in a setting uncharacteristically lacking blood and gore. There was something easily simplistic about it, three friends sitting together. They could have been in the break room in a sterile corporate setting, instead of three doors down from a ballistics lab. For a little while, it was good to keep that illusion.

"Hey," Sara said with a smile, breaking the silence and smiling as she entered the break room and made her way straight to the coffee pot. This time, Catherine accepted a refill, and Nick and Warrick declined.

"Hey," Warrick acknowledged, and sat up. "Grissom here?"

She shrugged. "Doubt it. He was still in the shower when I left." She took a seat next to him.

Across the table, Nick squirmed visibly, and Catherine looked faintly amused at his discomfort. Sara blushed slightly as she realized what she'd said, and this time the silence was an awkward one.

"Then we've got time," Warrick decided. "Nick, I've got a bill that says I kick your ass in Goldeneye at least twice before shift starts."

"You're on."

Catherine rolled her eyes with a wry grin, muttering something about boys and their toys, and Sara grinned impishly, leaning behind her to snag a magazine out of the rack, thumbing it open to an article on computer-aided fiber analysis.  



	23. Sign and Semblance Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sara was the only one who noticed when he cleared his throat the first time, and Catherine picked up on it the second time, but the boys were still lost in their game. Taking a seat, Grissom simply watched them impassively until Warrick rounded the corner and surprised Nick with a hail of bullets, washing his half of the screen in red and eliciting theatrical wails from the CSI.

Grissom entered to chaos - Nick and Warrick each had barely ten percent of life left on the tie-breaker game, and had taken to childishly trying to break each other's concentration by sneaking in shoves and light punches. Catherine was leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, watching the two overgrown boys, and even Sara was snickering to herself as she watched over the edges of the forensics journal.

Sara was the only one who noticed when he cleared his throat the first time, and Catherine picked up on it the second time, but the boys were still lost in their game. Taking a seat, Grissom simply watched them impassively until Warrick rounded the corner and surprised Nick with a hail of bullets, washing his half of the screen in red and eliciting theatrical wails from the CSI.

This time, they both heard his harumph, and Nick turned quickly while Warrick hastily shoved the game system and controllers back under the television and flicked the power switch.

"So nice of you to join us," Grissom observed wryly. "Nothing new tonight, so we're all still on the Tolmen and James murders. I'd like to hear updates from everyone on where they stand in the investigation, starting with the Tolmen case."

They went around the room, and by the end of it, everyone was caught up to speed on everyone else's work. There had been so much coming and going over the past twenty-four hours that some things had slipped through the cracks, and each CSI learned something new from the others' work.

Nick, who had handled the bulk of the most incriminating evidence, finished off. "We would have enough to charge James, if he weren't dead. But either way, I think we can label it case closed."

Grissom nodded in agreement. "Any objections?"

There were none.

"I'll expect your final reports by the end of the week. Now, the James murder."

Once again, they went around the table, but the exposés took considerably less time. They'd been working the case for twenty-four hours less than Bianca's, and it stood to reason that there wasn't as much uncovered yet. On the other hand, they had more evidence to work with.

"Sara will be with me in autopsy. Catherine, I want you working on the blood spatter analysis. Warrick, the surveillance tapes. The PD should have been able to eliminate all apartment residents for you. I want you to return to the apartment, collect all the pictures you can, and start matching up faces. Use the photographs taken from Bianca's dressing room table, too. Nick - the clothes we found near the body. See if you can match the blood to James's, and find out everything you can about where they may have come from. Any questions?"

Once again, no one had anything to bring up, and Grissom nodded, standing to signal an end to the meeting.

Sara slid her arms into the lab coat and smock, pulling her hair back in a ponytail and sliding a ventilation mask around her neck. Outfit complete, she entered the autopsy bay to find Doc Robbins sliding the plastic bags off the corpse's hands.

"Just in time," he said, looking up to see her. "Grissom coming?"

"He had to check on his bugs," Sara said, setting the evidence kit on an empty table and taking out materials to begin digging under the body's fingernails for any skin that may have come off during a struggle. There wasn't much there - James had kept his fingernails very short, probably as a byproduct of having to wear latex gloves as a doctor. The same was true for any of the CSIs. "He'll be here soon, though. He said to get started without him."

Robbins shrugged, and began laying out his instruments as Sara printed James's hands - fingertips, fingers, and palms. That accomplished, she turned his hands in the light - it looked like there might be defensive wounds, but under the blood, she couldn't tell. Just in case, she swabbed each knuckle.

Grissom entered just as she had finished swabbing both hands and Robbins had begun to look more closely at the battered remains of the body's skull. The right temple was nearly entirely caved in, skin broken so that shards of bone were protruding.

Sara stepped back, capping the swabs off and labelling each one, and crossed her arms over her chest. Grissom leaned against the autopsy table next to her, his shoulder brushing hers, and she smiled up at him briefly before turning her attention back to the body in front of her as Robbins clicked on his tape recorder and began to talk them through the autopsy.

The first thing to turn up was a splinter of wood embedded in the skull wound, to be shadowed by three other smaller splinters in wounds that had also exposed bone - shoulder, hip, and kneecap. The vast majority of the wounds had also bled, leading Robbins to speculate that the weapon they were looking for was jagged, at least on the end that had connected with the body.

The catalogue of damage was impressive - broken ribs, ruptured organs, massive internal hemhorraging, and a shattered vertebrae. The severed nerves that accompanied that last injury, on the lower back, indicated that it had been a paralyzing blow, waist down.

In the end, Robbins was hesitant to say which of the injuries had actually killed James. Any of a half dozen would have lead to death unless they'd occurred practically inside an emergency room. The most likely culprit seemed to be the massive cranial fracture that Sara had noticed earlier, but it was possible that he could have lived a few seconds after that only to be finished off by the failure of an internal organ, or even of the heart as it struggled under the strain of trauma-induced shock.

A half-dozen of the injuries had been inflicted post-mortem, mostly weaker blows around the chest and stomach area. That, along with the faded lividity on the back, led Robbins to theorize that he had died on his back, and the killer had kept raining blows on the body.

It was, without a doubt, a rage killing, and an intimate one. They were looking for someone who had known James, and while neither Grissom nor Sara spoke their opinions out loud, it seemed clear that Bianca's death had been the trigger.

"Okay, first things first. The blood? It all matches the sample that was waiting for me when I got in to the lab. I slept very well, thank you."

Nick raised his eyebrow at Greg, who grimaced and continued.

"Right, so all of the blood on the clothes is James's. And it is James's. It matches the hairs Sara bagged from his apartment." The appropriate documentation was passed over, and Nick slid it into a file with the other bloodwork from the case.

"What about the material?"

"Nothing really interesting," Greg said with a shrug. "Typical synthetic mix."

"From the weave and the heft, I'd say we're looking at a polo shirt of some kind," Nick guessed, picking up one of the smaller pieces of bagged tan material.

"And your other sample is denim. Again, nothing really interesting. Jeans and a polo shirt." Greg shrugged. "Sorry I can't really help you any further than that."

"Wait a second," Nick said, standing up abruptly. He reached across for a q-tip and cleaning solution, and slid the piece of cloth out and onto the counter, wetting the q-tip and dabbing carefully at the corner of the material.

Slowly, slowly, the soot began to come off of the cloth and reveal tan material beneath. Greg practically hooked his chin over Nick's shoulder, fascinated, as the CSI discarded a dirty q-tip in favor of another, repeating the process as he slowly revealed more and more of the cloth that had been obscured by soot. To the casual observer, it had just looked like extensive charring, but there had simply been an abundance of black grit rubbed into that corner of the cloth.

When he had cleared away the area entirely, there was a quarter inch or so of black embroidery visible. Part of a design - a curve, some flowing ribbons, half of a quirked smile - and the letters LAS V.

"Comedy and Tragedy," Greg observed. "Symbols of theater everywhere."

"I wonder if the Las Vegas Reperetory Theater gives out staff t-shirts?" Nick wondered aloud, and smirked in satisfaction.

It was slow, awkward work, comparing the grainy enhanced photos from the surveillance camera against the photographs from James's apartment. So far, Warrick had eliminated three of the men and women whose faces who had been captured during the thirty hours James could have been killed, and who the apartment complex manager had not recognized. The fourth - a thin, nervous man with mussed blond hair - hadn't matched any of the pictures from the apartment, and Warrick moved on to the snapshots from the dressing room with a grim determination.

Still no match.

He set aside two more photos, and had one left to go, when Catherine entered and leaned her elbows on the layout table, leaning over to look at his work.

"Hey."

"Hey," he responded without looking up, and began to compare the last surveillance photo - a short, slightly overweight young woman with long curling dark hair. "How's the blood spatter analysis going?"

"It's going," she said with a sigh. "Just needed a break for a little while."

"I understand completely," Warrick muttered, and continued on down the next column of pictures, finally sitting back, blowing a frustrated breath out through his lips as he tossed the last surveillance photo aside. "None of these match."

"Well, we identified a void in blood pattern among the pictures," Catherine pointed out. "One of them was missing. I think we have to assume that our killer was in that picture, and took it with him."

"Yeah." It still wasn't an appetizing possibility.

Sara brought the bindles with the scrapings from underneath James's fingernails to Greg's lab herself. The lab tech was drumming the fingers of his left hand on the countertop as he completed a form with his right hand, humming out of tune to whatever was playing into his headphones.

She tapped him on the shoulder, and without budging, he held up the index finger of his left hand, asking her to wait for just a few seconds. He signed off on the form and dropped it into the OUT box, and hooked the headphones around to his neck. The music pouring out made her wince immediately at its sheer volume. "How may I serve you?"

"Some skin samples from our DB's fingernails, possibly from his killer. I need you to run them against the DNA samples from the theater workers."

"It's Carter James, by the way," Greg told her as he took the bindles and began preparing the samples. "Robbins sent me a sample first thing, and it matched both the hair you took from the apartment, and the blood on the shirt. And the swabs from the blood spatter in the apartment."

"Nice to have it confirmed."

"Hmmm. Anything interesting in the autopsy?" When she gave him an incredulous look - autopsy results were far outside of his normal purview - he shrugged. "I'm trying to learn all I can about being a CSI."

She shrugged. "Massive trauma. He was beaten to death at close quarters."

"Rage killing," Greg said, nodding. He got another incredulous look. "I pay attention."

"Apparently," she said with a smile. "I'm going to go see where Grissom's getting with his bugs - come get me when it's finished processing, okay?"

"Will do."

Grissom was leaned over his worktable, measuring a maggot with calipers with his left hand and taking notes with his right, and Sara leaned in the doorway, right leg hooked over her left, shoulders offset.

"I will never understand how you do that," she told him, voice full of admiration.

"I could teach you," he offered, his back still to the door as he finished making his notes. She entered the office and leaned a hip against the worktable, careful not to block his light. "It's not that difficult."

"That's why you're the entomologist in this relationship," she snarked. "Because you think that's easy."

"A statement like that, Sara, seems to indicate that an entomologist is a necessary component of a relationship," Grissom said solemnly.

She wasn't sure, but she thought he was smirking. He still hadn't looked up from the maggot. "Well, it is for me."

Now he looked up, and the expression on his face was priceless. A slow smile spread across his lips, and she congratulated herself on completely distracting him from his bug calculations, if only for a few seconds. "That doesn't give you much of a pool," he continued, still smiling. "There aren't all that many entomologists in this country."

"What can I say?" she answered. "I got lucky." Now it was her turn to grin at him, and they rested like that, content to just smile at each other.

Belying her earlier comments about its difficulty, Sara finally pulled up a stool to observe Grissom as he worked, and found herself understanding a great deal more than she'd thought she would have. Of course, she had always been a quick study, and she had read the entomology book Grissom had given her for Christmas cover-to-cover so many times he had jokingly asked her if it contained the secrets of the universe.

To which her response had been a gap-toothed grin. "No. Just to you."

He'd blushed at that, and Sara smiled at the memory as she rested her chin in her hand and watched him now, fascinated by his precise, agile movements in picking up the insects and measuring them, flipping the pages of the reference books, bringing over the high-powered magnifying glass to confirm observations.

She couldn't have said how much longer it was when Greg knocked at the door, startling them both out of the quiet intimacy. He cleared his throat, and by the acutely embarrassed look on his face, she could tell he thought he'd interrupted something. What, she wasn't quite sure - there were maggots crawling all over the worktable - but still he stood there and shuffled his feet.

"Yes?" she finally asked, prodding him into speech.

"Your DNA results."

"And?"

"Got a match."  



	24. Sign and Semblance Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prop manager stood quickly and slammed his head on the underside of the shelf with a yelp. Reaching a hand up to rub at the sore spot, he scurried backward, and Grissom and Brass had to dance out of the way to avoid him. Finally clear of the shelf he had been looking under, he stood, sword in hand.

"Mr. Meadows."

The prop manager stood quickly and slammed his head on the underside of the shelf with a yelp. Reaching a hand up to rub at the sore spot, he scurried backward, and Grissom and Brass had to dance out of the way to avoid him. Finally clear of the shelf he had been looking under, he stood, sword in hand.

Brass's hand went to his holster automatically, and Neil laughed nervously. "No, it's not real. Doesn't even have a blade." He swung the dull metal into his palm a few times to show them. "It'd probably bend if you tried to actually use it to hit anything. Made out of tin." His hand ran up the blade to caress it briefly, and he set it down on the table beside him with a clang. "Can I help you?"

"You can, actually," Grissom said pleasantly. "Where were you on the night of the twenty-fourth?"

"The night Bianca died?" Neil blinked in surprise, and ran a hand through his hair, sending the blond tips into spiky disarray. "Uh, I hung around here for a little while, cleaned up, stuff like that. Then I went home."

"What time was that?" Brass asked.

"Ten, ten-thirty. I don't really remember. I was pretty shaken up." His voice shook with emotion, and this time when he ran his hand through his hair he left it at the back of his neck, fingers wrapped around the nape, and leaned his cheek against the inside of his forearm.

"And you went straight home."

"Yeah. Sure. Well, no, I mean, I stopped for a burger on the way home. I hadn't eaten since early that afternoon, and I never bring food in. Hate reheated stuff." He dropped his arm and shoved both hands into his jean pockets. "Is, uh, is there a problem?"

"Do you have a roommate, Mr. Meadows?" Grissom asked, leaning sideways to rest his shoulder against the doorjamb.

"No. I've got a studio. Not really much room there even for me." He rocked backward on his heels. "I've um, got to keep putting the props away, if this can wait?"

"It really can't," Brass informed him with a slightly frightening smile. "We're going to need you to come with us."

There was finally a flicker of some emotion other than nervousness behind Neil's muddy brown eyes. "Look, what is this about?"

"Your DNA was found at a crime scene," Grissom said bluntly.

"What?" Now Brass's hand moved to hover over his holster again. "No, don't do that, I'm not going to...fine, I'll come with you." Neil's jaw muscles worked rapidly.

Brass gestured for him to precede them out of the small prop ready room, and Grissom stepped aside, sweeping the room one last time with a penetrating look, and then followed the detective and the prop manager out.

"You want front or back?" Warrick asked as he and Sara stood shoulder to shoulder, surveying the beat-up sedan in front of them.

"Oh, back," Sara nodded emphatically. "The most interesting stuff's always in the trunk."

"Morbid," Warrick snorted, and opened up the driver's side door. "But you do have a point."

Sara's answer was a peal of laughter and the jingle of keys as she unlocked the trunk.

"Nothing too much up here," he narrated. "Fast food bag, complete with stale french fries. Half-empty Coke can. Change." He flipped open the glove compartment. "This could get interesting...and jackpot." He slithered back out of the car with the photograph in his hand. "Sara?"

"Hit the lights, would you?"

He complied, and was struck immediately by the sight of Sara bathed in the reflective light of luminol. "Wow."

"Wow is right." Sara stepped back a few paces to let him see into the trunk. It seemed like every single surface of the inside was glowing. "Told you the trunk was always the most interesting part."

"Hey, I didn't disagree with you. But check this out." He slanted the photo so that she could see it in the light from the luminol. "Look familiar?"

"That's Bianca Tolmen. And she's with a guy who was in a couple of the photos from her apartment. Neil Meadows?"

"Neil Meadows," he confirmed. "Not just that, but I'm pretty sure his is one of the faces I was trying to match earlier. He was in the apartment building when James was killed."

"Did we nail down a murder weapon yet?" Nick asked as Catherine fitted the key to the lock.

She shook her head. "Jagged on one end, elongated. Wood, but we don't know what type yet. That could be any number of things."

"Wonder if Meadows plays baseball?" Nick theorized aloud as the tumblers in the lock clicked.

"We'll find out," she said, and pushed open the door. Behind her, he flicked on his flashlight and threw a beam of light into the dark apartment.

The light switch was located quickly, and with a minimum of awkwardness as they both tried to maneuver around the tiny hall entryway before progressing any further. Finally they were able to see further into the apartment, and Nick whistled. "Man, I don't know how anyone could live like this."

"Obviously, you've never seen Sara's apartment," Catherine snarked as she took the three steps from door to kitchen and Nick followed her, two more steps placing him smack in the middle of the living room/bedroom.

"Hers is bigger than this," Nick argued, though as he took in the room, he had to admit that it wasn't much bigger. He was about to add something about how she didn't really live in her apartment anyway, but caught it just before the words escaped his mouth. "Some pretty high tech computer equipment back here. Didn't Vega say this guy was a computer science major?"

"UNLV, same year as James and both Tolmens." The background check had been exceedingly cursory, but they'd been able to find some information before heading out. Catherine swung the cabinet door closed. "There's not much in the kitchen. Leftover takeout and some paper plates. An unopened box of Luna bars."

"That's weird. Isn't that chick food?" Nick asked, and winced under Catherine's look. "Right, right. Hey, here's Bianca Tolmen," he said, trying to change the subject.

He held up the framed photograph for her inspection. Bianca stood in the middle with her arms around her brother on one side and Neil Meadows on the other.

"Wait a second," Catherine murmered, and knelt down to open up her evidence kit, standing up again with a swab and a bottle. "There was a picture missing from James's apartment." She dabbed the swab around the glass, careful to cover the entire surface. Sure enough, the swab turned bright red.

"Well now, that's going to be a little hard to explain away," Nick drawled.

"He folded pretty quickly," Warrick observed from where he was leaning practically on top of the two-way mirror.

"No alibi and the weight of the evidence against him," Catherine said with a shrug, on the other end of the mirror from Warrick, arms crossed. "Smartest thing to do, plead guilty to second-degree murder."

"We still don't have a murder weapon," Sara pointed out, dangling her legs from the table.

"Grissom'll get to it." Nick kicked sideways from where he was sitting next to her, sending her legs into disarray and disrupting the methodical swing of her feet. She made a face at him, but resisted kicking back.

They watched as Neil Meadows shook with fine tremors, unable to meet Grissom or Brass's eyes, practically curled in on top of himself. His court-appointed attorney was doing most of the talking, bargaining with choppy hand movements and an ominous frown.

"So let me get this straight," Brass began, addressing himself to Neil. "You thought Bianca was dead, you immediately decided that Carter James was responsible. And you went to kill him."

"No!" Neil protested, finally looking up, but still keeping his gaze focused on the wall. "I went to talk to him."

"That's not the first time I've heard 'talking' as a euphemism for murder," Brass snapped. "Care to explain a little better?"

"The firewood," Sara said suddenly, and all eyes in the small observation room turned to her. She jumped up. "James had a fireplace remember?"

"Yeah, but it was fake," Catherine pointed out.

"He still had fire tools," Sara remembered. "And a couple of pieces of firewood, I remember seeing them. It must have been an appearances thing. And then later, he could have used it to start the fire to burn the clothes. It would have been dry, from sitting out all that time. Maybe it even went up too fast, and didn't burn the clothes through. He didn't have time to find more wood, so he just stuffed them under a bush and hoped we wouldn't find them. We almost didn't." She shook her head ruefully.

"It was just right there," Neil was saying. "And I looked up, and there was the picture of us. And he'd killed her. He'd murdered her. I loved her." He broke down in piteous sobs, and Brass looked distinctly uncomfortable. Grissom tapped his lips and watched Neil with a steady gaze.

"Way to go, Sar," Nick praised.

"I wonder if she ever knew?" Catherine said softly. "If he ever told her?"

"Doubt it," Warrick shrugged. "Even after he gave up compsci and went into theater to follow her. Her own personal ghost."

"And avenger," Sara whispered. "He did kill her. And if Meadows hadn't killed him, Carter James would be in there on his way to jail instead of him. It wasn't even worth it."

"I don't get the sense that he regrets it." Nick frowned in thought.

"Well, he's going to have life in prison to regret it." Catherine pushed off from the wall. "Anyway. I've got a forced entry in Henderson. Looks like our dry spell might be ending. Warrick, you want in?"

"Yeah, I'll take some of that," he said, following her out of the observation room and leaving Nick and Sara sitting on the table, watching Neil tell about wrapping the body in the plastic tablecloth and carrying it down the stairs to the service door.

"So."

Sara turned and raised an eyebrow at Nick. "Yes?"

"You and Grissom."

She fought to hold back a smile. "Yes...?"

"I..." He let out an explosive breath. "Yeah."

Sara nudged him with her shoulder. "Hey." Her tone prompted him to continue.

"Just as long as you're happy," he blurted out.

"Nick." She looked at him, silently urging him to turn and meet her eyes. When he did, she smiled at him. "I'm really happy."

"Okay." He met her smile with a tentative one of his own. "Okay." He hopped down from the table. "I'm going to go check with dispatch and see if anything else is on the plate for tonight."

"Catch you later." He waved at her behind his back as he left the room, and she shook her head with a smile.

"I looked up the original Bible passage the quote on the roses was taken from."

"Oh?" Sara twirled the mostly-empty wine glass between her fingers and watched him dice zucchini from where she was perched on the bar stool. "And what was it?"

"For love is as strong as death, Jealousy as cruel as the grave; Its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it," Grissom quoted. "Song of Solomon, 8:6."

"Jealousy as cruel as the grave," she repeated. "That certainly proved true in this case. I take it back, that wasn't a very good sentiment after all. I'll take a plant anyday." She threw a fond glance at the orchid where it rested on her windowsill. They were in her apartment tonight; a convenience store robbery had kept Grissom away from the labs until nearly ten AM, and she had gone straight home. He had woken her up with a kiss and a bag of groceries an hour ago.

He didn't answer, just continued chopping and finally swept the bits of vegetable into another bowl and took out another zucchini.

"What are you making, anyway?"

"It's a surprise," he chided, raising an eyebrow at her.

"Fine." She tossed her hair back and took another sip of the wine. "I finished reading the play, by the way. I'll return the book next time we're at your place."

"How did you like the end?" Grissom finished with the zucchini and moved on to an eggplant.

"A little contrived. But Beatrice and Benedick were fun right up to the end. Definitely the better couple." She leaned forward and snuck a piece of zucchini out of the bowl, his swatting hand coming just a second too late. She stuck her tongue out at him.

"I do love nothing in the world so well as you," Grissom quoted again softly. "Is not that strange?"

"Oh, okay, now that's good sentiment," Sara said, blinking back sudden tears.

"For which of my bad parts did thou first fall in love with me?" he continued, rounding the kitchen counter and setting his hands on her shoulders, turning her to face him.

"For them all together," she answered, swallowing past the lump in her throat and standing up to kiss him softly.

"Mmph," Grissom mumbled against her lips. "Dinner."

"Dessert," she countered, and whimpered in complaint when he drew away and returned behind the counter.

"You never did see the ending performed," he said casually. "The theater offered us refund tickets."

"Isn't that a little morbid, Griss?" she said, making a face.

"Maybe," he conceded, and reached into the grocery bag. "I got the movie."  



End file.
